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Robert H. Torheim

MANAGEMENT TECHNOLOGY IN THE U.S. FOREST SERVICE:
EXPERIMENTATION AND INNOVATION IN THE FIELD, 1948-1979

Regional Oral History Office
The Bancroft Library

ROBERT H. TORHEIM

1976
Photo by U.S. Forest Service

Regional Oral History Office University of California

The Bancroft Library Berkeley, California

U.S. Forest Service Management Series

Robert H. Torheim

MANAGEMENT TECHNOLOGY IN THE U.S. FOREST SERVICE:
EXPERIMENTATION AND INNOVATION IN THE FIELD, 1948-1979

An Interview Conducted by

Ann Lage
March 13-14, 1980

Underwritten by the
United States Forest Service

Copy No. /
Copyright (c) 1980 by the Regents of the University of California

TABLE OF CONTENTS — Robert Torheim

INTERVIEW HISTORY

I BACKGROUND IN THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST 1

Seattle Youth, 1920s-1930s 1

Semirural setting 2

Influence of the Depression 3

Training in Woodsmanship 4

War and Education 5

Career Choice and Family 6

Career Summary: From Junior Forester to Regional Forester,

1948-1979 8

II RESOURCE AND MULTIPLE-USE MANAGEMENT, 1950s- 1960s 15

A Custodial Role, 1905-1945 15

Wartime and Postwar Predominance of Timber Management Activities 16

Engineers and Foresters: Conflicting Cultures? 19

Strength of the Multiple-Use Ethic 24

Increasing Specialization and Complexity, 1960s-1970s 26

Land-Use Planning in the Fifties: Functional Plans 28

Multiple-Use Planning and Its Drawbacks 29

Field Experimentation in New Planning Techniques 33

Public Involvement in the Fifties: Local and Unstructured 34

Public Input: Yakima Valley Elk 37

William 0. Douglas: Naches District "Assistant Ranger" 38

III LAND MANAGEMENT PLANNING, 1970s 42

National Forest Management Act: Forest Service Input 42

Lolo National Forest Plan, a Case Study 45

From Unit to Forest Planning 46

Public Involvement in Determining Issues 46

Evaluating Public Involvement 48

Forest Plans and the RPA: An Iterative Process 51

Team Management, Conflict or Consensus? 54

Learning the Art of Personnel Management 58

Washington Office Guidance for Land Management 60

Uniform Work Planning: Imposed from Above 61

Land Planning: Experimentation in the Field 62

The Plan and Program Decisions in the Field 65

Allocation and Funding under the RPA 68

The Budgeting and Allocation Process, Pre-1970 69

Power of the Staff in Allocating Funds 71

Motivation for Forest Service Reorganization 73

IV MANAGERIAL METHODS AND STYLES IN THE FOREST SERVICE 77

Hierarchical Structure, Authoritarian Management, 1920-19 50s 77

Pioneer in Scientific Management 78

Autonomy, within Set Limits 80

Postwar Changes 81

"The Way the Rig Ran," an Illustration 83

The Work Planning System in the Field 87

Phasing Out the Diary 89

Participative Management and Management by Objectives 91

Introducing Behavioral Sciences into Management 93

The Managerial Grid Training System 95

Long term Benefits from Managerial Training 101

Adapting to Change, Dealing with Conflict 103

Cliff and McGuire: Managerial Styles Illustrated 106

V THE FOREST SERVICE ORGANIZATION: CHANGES AND CHALLENGES 109

Reorganization in the Seventies 109

Field Experimentation for Structural Change 111

Multiple Deputies and Line/Staff Adjustments 113

Reaction to Changed Staff Responsibilities 116

From Inspections to Management Reviews 120

A Growing Openness in the Organization 124

The Forest Service on the Defense: Public Involvement 125

Involving the Public in Management Decisions 127

Political Responsibilities of Field Administrators 131

Forest Service Input on Legislative Policy 134

Computers: a Management Tool, a Tool to Manage 140

Management Information Systems 145

A Centralizing Influence 146

Innovative Response to New Technology 147

VI PERSONNEL MANAGEMENT 150

Civil Rights and Equal Opportunity 150

Efforts to Recruit Minorities 151

Employment of Women, a Success Story 155

The Job Corps 159

Lateral Entry and the Promotion of Specialists 161

Employee Dissatisfaction in Region 6 166

Role of Technicians in the Work Force 169

Regional Differences and Washington Office Coordination 171

Fostering and Controlling Innovation in the Field 173

TAPE GUIDE 178

INDEX 179

INTERVIEW HISTORY

The Robert Torheim interview is the fourth in a series on the subject
of management technology in the United States Forest Service. Conceived of
by Dr. Ernst Valfer, chief of the Management Sciences Staff of the Forest
Service's Southwest Experiment Station in Berkeley, the interviews explore
changes in the techniques of managing the Forest Service organization over
the past half century. Individual interviewees were selected to represent
various eras of Forest Service managers and to reflect the viewpoints of
the field — the ranger districts, forest supervisors, and regional offices —
as well as of the Washington office. Taken together, the completed interviews
will offer a broad perspective, based on firsthand experiences, on how the
Forest Service has devised and adapted modern management technologies to fit
the needs of its rapidly growing organization and to respond to the increasing
demands placed on it by federal legislation of the 1960s and 1970s.

Robert Torheim was selected as an interviewee for the series in part
to give the view of a manager whose primary career experience has been in
the field. From this perspective he demonstrates in his interview how
changes in management techniques repeatedly resulted from a felt need at
the field level, experimentation with new methods in the field, and finally
adoption and standardization of the new methods by the Washington office on
a service-wide basis.

For six years from 1965 to 1971, Torheim served in the service's
personnel division, both in the Region 6 office in Portland and in Washington,
D.C., where he directed employee development and training for the Forest

Service nationwide. His work in personnel coincided with the onset of
Forest Service involvement with the Job Corps and the service's active
efforts to bring minorities and women into the work force. His accounts of
Forest Service efforts to respond to these societal needs is particularly
insightful. Also of special interest are Torheim's views of the art of
"people management," and his account of the introduction of behavioral
science methods and principles into management, primarily through the
vehicle of the management grid training system. His comments in this area
illuminate one of the ways in which the service has been able to deal with
increased complexity and conflict as the business of national forest land
management has become a focus of national concern and public involvement in
the sixties and seventies.

Mr. Torheim participated fully in the preparation for this interview,
exhibiting a clear sense of the purpose of the series and providing the
interviewer with a well organized and thoughtful outline of suggested topics.
The interview was conducted on March 13 and 14, 1980, in the Region 6 offices
in Portland, Oregon, close to the suburb of Beaverton, where Torheim now
lives with his wife, Marjean. The three lengthy interview sessions proceeded
in an orderly and concise fashion, covering all the topics as planned. Mr.
Torheim made no substantive changes in the text during the editing process.
The cooperative and quietly efficient manner in which Mr. Torheim joined in
the entire interviewing process exemplifies for the interviewer the skill of
participative management which Mr. Torheim describes so well in the text of
this interview.

Ann Lage

Interviewer/Editor
August 11, 1980

Berkeley, California

I BACKGROUND IN THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST
[Interview 1: March 13, 1980] ##

Seattle Youth, 1920s-1930s

Lage: This is an interview with Robert Torheim who has recently retired

as regional forester for Region 1 of the U.S. Forest Service.
Today's date is March 13, 1980, and I am Ann Lage from the Regional
Oral History Office of The Bancroft Library. The subject of this
series of interviews -is management technology in the Forest
Service. We're going to start out with something a little closer
to home, with some discussion of your personal background. Do you
want to tell me where you were born, and when, and what type of
community it was?

Torheim: I was born in Seattle, Washington, February 18, 1923. I was

really living out on the fringes of the city near the University
of Washington which now of course is right in the middle of town,
but at that time it was on the fringe of rural; it was on the edge

##This symbol indicates that a tape or a segment of a tape has
begun or ended. For a guide to the tapes see page 178.

Torheim: of suburbia as we know it today. It was suburbia creeping

into the fringes of the farm lands and cutover timber lands.

Lage: What did your father do?

Torheim: My father was an immigrant from Norway. He was a steel worker

building buildings all over Seattle and the Northwest. My mother
was a registered nurse, an immigrant from Sweden. She worked
part-time as a surgical nurse. My growing up days were mostly in
the Depression.

Semirural Setting

Lage: So your father's occupation wasn't rural? You were oriented

toward the city?

Torheim: Well, sort of. You have to know Seattle. Seattle was a large
city with a small town atmosphere. Living out in the fringes,
we lived close enough to a dairy just three blocks away, a very
large dairy, that I worked at milking cows and delivering milk.
So you see it was a mix. In fact, if you go west of Portland
where I live now it's still that way. You'll find dairies inter
mingled with creeping suburbia. Our family was oriented to the
outdoors, though, because my father was a native of the fjords of
Norway, way back, from a little farm. My mother was from northern
Sweden in the forested area, so the orientation was much toward
the salt water and the forests.

Lage: How about brothers and sisters?

Torheim: I had one brother two years younger than me.

Lage: Did your family enjoy outdoor activities? Did you hunt or fish?
Torheim: Yes, both; more oriented toward salt water — Puget Sound. We used

to fill the boat with salmon before there was any kind of limit.

But then we lived on salmon year around. That was our principal

source of protein, in fact, during the Depression.
Lage: So it wasn't just for fun.
Torheim: We enjoyed it, but it was more than for fun and, as people did,

we traded. Our neighbors had a chicken farm so we traded salmon

to them for eggs. There was a lot of that.

Influence of the Depression

Lage: Now, you mentioned the Depression. Would you say that this had a.
lasting effect on your own perceptions?

Torheim: I think so, quite profound, because our family had some tough

times during the Depression as did all our neighbors. It was very
much a coalescing and a gathering together of people in the
community for self-support. It was kind of a tough time.

Lage: I would think it would affect your vision of the government's
role and maybe of the Forest Service's role.

Torheim: Probably. I have never thought of it that way, but I suppose
those imprints were made. Sure, they had to be.

Lage: Different from someone raised in the fifties.

Torheim: Oh, very much, yes.

Lage: Shall we go into your education?

Torheim: All right. I went to grade school and high school there north
of Seattle near the university. I wasn't sure what I wanted to
take, however, but I knew I was going to the university. I didn't
have any money. So at age seventeen I enrolled in the Civilian
Conservation Corps and was a $30-a-month enrollee for a year. It
wasn't very far from Seattle just by pure chance. It was at North
Bend, which is east of Seattle near Snoqualmie Pass in the
Snoqualmie National Forest, the North Bend ranger district. I
got quite well acquainted then with the Forest Service.

Training in Woodsmanship

Torheim: Prior to that time, during high school, I spent a lot of spare
time in the mountains, also that same area — hiking, fishing.

Lage: Was that common among youth in your neighborhood?

Torheim: Yes, we all did that. It was very common. This was kind of an

evolutionary process, I suppose, in retrospect, finding one's way
into the forest. So I knew much about woodsmanship and much about
getting along in the forest before I even graduated from high
school. Then I belonged to a conservation club in high school.
We planted trees each spring on the Snoqualmie National Forest.
This was all part of it too. Many of us did this.

Lage: Was your first contact with the Forest Service with the CCC?

Torheim: No, my first contact was as a hiker — backpackers they call them
today, but we were hikers. Fishing, hitting the mountain lakes,
going crosscountry, and climbing mountains and that sort of thing.

Torheim: We used to have to get fire permits from the ranger. We used to

run into trail crews. I knew quite a bit about the Forest Service
from these contacts.

Lage: They were very visible in these areas.

Torheim: Very visible, and I knew all about the difference between national
forests and national parks. I used to hike in Rainier and Olympic
National Parks too by the way. So I didn't have to have a course
in the difference. [laughs] But I really wasn't thinking at that
time of a career necessarily. That was solidified in the CCCs.
When I was an enrollee then I was saving part of my money. I was
saving $22 out of the $30. It was required that you send $22 of
the $30 home, and my father was banking it for me. So when I got
out of the CCC camp, I worked for a while for a bank as a messenger,
and then I enrolled in the University of Washington in 1941 in
forestry. I had enough for my tuition, and then I worked part-
time to keep me going. It gave me a start.

War and Education

Lage: Then the war intervened. Was that after college?

Torheim: No, it was in the middle like happened to so many people. I got
through my freshman year at the University of Washington. Then
I got through the fall quarter of my sophomore year. Now, to
show you how lucky one can be, I was among the first group of
teenagers to be drafted in Seattle. Nineteen-year olds and
eighteen-year olds had to register for the draft in 1942 in the

Torheim: summer while I was working in the Forest Service at Skykomish ,
Washington as a student. By golly, the first group that was
selected out of those eighteen and nineteen-year olds was in
January of '43, and I was in that first group, so we all got our
picture in the Seattle Times — the first teenagers to be drafted.
That's the only thing I ever won! [laughter] I went off to war
then.

Lage: And then returned to the University of Washington afterwards?

Torheim: Yes, I came back in November of 1945 and simply picked up where
I left off.

Lage: No change of purpose?

Torheim: No, no, I was eager to get my discharge and get on with finishing
my education, and I did. I worked again seasonally for the Forest
Service while going to school and graduated in 1948.

Career Choice and Family

Lage: Did you ever have any other thoughts of what you might do? Was
the Forest Service the first real —

Torheim: I took courses in high school, college preparation courses, that

would prepare me for either science or, well, we called it business
then. I was torn between whether I was going to be a business
administration major or something related to the outdoors. It
might have been fisheries; the university offered a fisheries
course. Now, I spent lots of time as a kid on the campus. We
lived only a mile and a half from campus, so I used to prowl

Torheim: around the College of Fisheries and the College of Forestry,

and I knew all about the texts they used and stuff.
Lage: This was an early interest.

Torheim: Yes, a very early interest but it wasn't solidified really until

I was in the CCC camp and began to work in the forest, doing

forestry work and seeing the men in it who are foremen, what

they were doing.

Lage: Did the type of individual seem particularly appealing to you?

Torheim: Oh, yes, yes, very much, and the type of organization, the quality

of the people, and the kind of work of course.
Lage: You really knew what you were getting into probably more than most

young people do.
Torheim: Very much, yes. Then the seasonal experiences as a student really

solidified it.
Lage: As you look back on it, are you glad that this was your career

choice?

Torheim: Oh, yes, I should say so.
Lage: You don't have regrets?

Torheim: None whatsoever. I should say not. I'd do it all over again if

that were possible, sure.

Lage: How about your own family? Do you have children?

Torheim: Yes.

Lage: What lines have they taken?

Torheim: Well, this is not unusual I understand. Neither of them are

interested in forestry as a career and aren't pursuing it, but

much of their free time is spent in outdoor pursuits, which is

Torheim: interesting. Our daughter graduated from Oregon State University
in political science. She had thoughts of going on to law school,
but then she got married and has two children. She's moved
around a lot and happens by chance to live here in Portland now,
but they'll probably move on to other things. So we have two
grandchildren and are rather close for the first time, and that's
kind of pleasant. She works too. She's an administrative
assistant for an insurance company.

Lage: You have a son also?

Torheim: Our son has always been in Portland since we first lived here.
He went back to Washington, D.C., with us for a couple of years
and then upon graduation from high school came right back. He went
to school and took communications — television and radio. Now he
is in radio advertising for a local radio station here. He's
married, and they have a little daughter. So we have three
grandchildren, all right here in Portland, which is very unusual
for us Forest Service types who usually are scattered around,
[laughs] But that's just pure chance.

Career Summary :_ From Junior^ Forester to Regional Forester,
1948-1979

Lage: Why don't you give us a brief outline of the direction your career

took, and then we can go on to specifics when we cover different
topics?

Torheim: Okay. In getting into the Forest Service I had to come the route
that everybody does by taking the civil service examination. But
actually I evolved into the Forest Service, and this was not
unusual with a number of Forest Service people who live somewhere
near the national forest and became acquainted with it. My
experience wasn't all that different. The CCC experience was a
little bit different, but many of my contemporaries that I went
to high school and college with had exactly the same experience.
By the time that we got our civil service appointments upon
graduation, we were already in the outfit so to speak. Our
seasonal work responsibilities were quite broad.

By pure chance again, my first appointment as junior forester
was on the North Bend district of the Snoqualmie Forest where I had
been a CCC enrollae.

Lage : It was just chance?

Torheim: Yes, I had not worked there seasonally at all. But I had worked

on the Snoqualmie. So I worked there, and we got married, my wife
Marjean and I, in that same year, 1948. I worked as a timber
management assistant for that district, an assistant to the ranger
for timber management work, and I was there for five years. People
didn't advance so rapidly then as they do today in the Forest
Service.

Then I was appointed as district ranger at Naches , which is
also in the Snoqualmie, or was at that time, but on the east side
of the Cascade Mountains, a completely different kind of district

Torheim: but a very interesting one. I was there three years. Then I
moved from there to the Olympic Peninsula, the wettest part of
the United States outside of Alaska or Hawaii, at the Quinault
Ranger Station which is about fifty miles north of Aberdeen and
adjacent to Olympic National Park. The average annual rainfall
there is between 140 and 180 inches. We used to say it rained
twelve to fifteen feet, which it does. It's very, very wet.

I was ranger there for less than three years. Then I moved
to a dry climate again, to southern Oregon (Medford, Oregon)
and became the staff assistant to the forest supervisor for fire
control, range management, and watershed activities.

Lage: What was that forest?

Torheim: That's the Rogue River National Forest. There we went down to

twenty inches annual precipitation and got dried out a little bit.
By the way, this was a typical career pattern from assistant
ranger to ranger, probably two districts or more, to staff. I
was there for five years and like most people I was aspiring to be
a forest supervisor. But I began to see working as principal
staff to the supervisor that a lot of the managerial problems
were not about things; they were about people, and I knew very
little about people management. So I decided to take a side step
in my career, and I applied for a job here in the regional office
in Portland in the division of personnel management. There was a
vacancy there as a placement officer. This was 1965, and by chance
this was when Job Corps came along, so I was involved right off

Torheim: the bat in recruiting for Job Corps. I specialized in that for

about close to six months. Then I was promoted to the branch chief
for employee development and training.

Lage: Had you yourself had training for this kind of people management?

Torheim: No.

Lage: It was just an interest?

Torheim: It was an interest. I had no formal training. Now, the job that
I competed for and was promoted to was employee development.
Having been in fire control, which was the principal training
activity in the Forest Service, I had lots of experience in
training and in safety. So technically I was quite well prepared
for that. That's how I got to be chief of the branch of training
as we called it. I was in that job for almost three years. Then
I was selected for the national job in Washington as the employee
development officer for the whole Forest Service in the division
of personnel management in Washington.

Lage: Was that about in '68?

Torheim: That was '68, yes; Washington, B.C., '68. Of course, one doesn't
plan all the steps in one's career. There's an awful lot of luck,
when openings occur, and when you're qualified at a particular
time. I was in Washington, D.C., only two years before the
opening in the regional office in Portland as a regional personnel
officer came up, and I was selected for that.

Page: Are these jobs that you hear of and apply for?

Torheim: No. It is now, but it wasn't then. There is a formal system
now for vacancy announcements. No, it wasn't that way at all.
We had promotion rosters, standing rosters, and we with our
immediate supervisor would lay out possible career choices for
the next step for which we were qualified. Then when a vacancy
came, the selecting official would take that roster and then pick
the best qualified out of that. It's different from that now,
but that's the way it happened.

Here I was back in Washington for two years and I wound up
coming back to Portland. That job was as direct assistant to the
regional forester. They were called division chiefs at that time,
1970. That was a typical Forest Service organization of many
years standing. Division chiefs also carried the title of
assistant regional forester. So I was the assistant regional
forester for personnel management or, in the jargon of the
personnel function, the regional personnel officer.

Then things happened a little faster. I didn't become a
forest supervisor. Now, that is different [from the usual Forest
Service promotional pattern]. By that time, gradewise and all, I
was up to that level and beyond. So I didn't go through the
supervisor's job at all. I was in the personnel officer's job
only a year when the regional forester, Charlie [Charles]
Connaughton here in Portland, retired. Rex Resler, who was the
deputy regional forester, moved up to his job, and I was selected
to be the deputy regional forester then.

Lage: In Portland?

Torheim: Right here, yes, in Portland. So I moved then back into line
jobs, from staff to line.

Lage: You're going to have to elaborate on that terminology at some

point.

Torheim: Staff jobs are jobs that are responsible for certain programs.

Line jobs are generalist jobs that manage a unit. The line jobs
in the Forest Service are district ranger, which manages a ranger
district, a part of a national forest; a forest supervisor who
manages a national forest; a regional forester who manages a
region; and a chief who manages all the Forest Service. So there's
a very direct and short line from the ranger to the chief.

Now, the deputies who fill the same box, so to speak, are
also line; they just help to do the same job.

Lage: Then you have the staff.

Torheim: The staff then serves as program managers for each of the program
areas, and this is true throughout the Forest Service.

Lage: But isn't that one of the new changes?

Torheim: Well, yes. There's a change in responsibility. When we talk
about organization we can go into that, and I'll describe that
in some detail, a profound change in functioning, yes, and the
change in nomenclature from assistant regional forester to
director really is an example of that.

Anyway, I became the deputy regional forester for Region 6.
Then the reorganization took place (and we can go into that in
more detail) which resulted in Region 6 having three deputies

Torheim: instead of the one — a deputy for resources, for administration,
and for State and Private Forestry. So I became then (as other
deputy regional foresters in the country, most of them anyway), the
deputy for resources. I was in that job from 1974 until 1976.

In 1976 I was selected to be the regional forester for Region 1
in Missoula, Montana.

Lage: That was the first time you had had any contact with Region 1.

Torheim: It was the first time I had worked in Region 1, yes.

Lage: Is that unusual?

Torheim: A little bit. Yes, a little bit. The usual route of travel is

for a person to have spent some time in at least two regions and
the Washington office. I had spent my regional time in one region
and the Washington office and that's not typical.

Lage: At some point we may also want to discuss differences in regions.

Torheim: Yes, there are conspicuous differences in regions and they are

just as noticeable as the differences in society in different parts
of our country.

Then I was regional forester in Montana for three years and
I retired last June, 1979. That's the whole story.

Lage: That's a good outline. We're getting the background built up here.

So your formal career was about thirty years or more.

Torheim: It was more than that. With my seasonal time, my total time with
the Forest Service was thirty- two years. Then I was in the army
for three, so my total federal service was thirty-five years.

II RESOURCE AND MULTIPLE- USE MANAGEMENT, 19 50s- 19 60s

A Custodial Role, 1905-1945

Lage: You've seen a lot of changes in the Forest Service, particularly,

you said, since World War II.

Torheim: Particularly since World War II. That's when the Forest Service
itself changed, of course, as far as its mission — not mission so
much but level of activity I should say.

Lage: Why don't you give us an overview of that change, and that will

give us a good picture to build on.

Torheim: All right, I'll see if I can do it concisely. The Forest Service
from its beginnings in 1905 until World War II was principally
occupied with protecting the national forest and serving the
users of the national forests. Commodity production from the
national forests, particularly timber, was not a big activity.
It was in some national forests prior to World War I, and it
was in the twenties. But then after the Depression occurred in
1929 it trickled to almost nothing, part of the reason being
that the demand for timber and forest products was low enough
that it was public policy to have the private sector provide

Torheim: that and not have the government compete with the private sector,
which was having trouble enough keeping its head above water.

Lage: So the private sector really preferred that the government maintain
just a protective role.

Torheim: Yes, particularly during those tough economic times when the
public timber wasn't needed, at least in the short run. Of
course, the plan was (and it was public policy) that these forests
would be available later when it was needed. So as far as timber
management was concerned, or timber production, it didn't really
amount to a whole lot from 1905 until 1945.

On the other hand, the Forest Service did produce much forage
for cattle and sheep and horses during all of this period and even
prior to the creation of the national forests. So grazing was a
very large activity in the western national forests, and that was
a commodity. And also public recreation — concessionnaires (we
called them special use permittees) as they are today with resorts
and campgrounds and hot springs and ski areas.

Wartime and Postwar Predominance_of Timber Management Activities

Torheim: The big change, though, started during World War II when the demand
for timber rose dramatically during the war years. Certain
specialty products were removed from the national forests. Noble
fir, for example, to make airplanes — to make mosquito bombers — was
one type of logging activity that was really related to the needs
of the war.

Lage: Sitka spruce —

Torheim: Sitka spruce was a World War I activity for the same reason, by
the way. There was some of that in World War II also, but not
like there was in World War I up on the Olympic Peninsula and in
Western Oregon where the army did the logging actually, the spruce
division. Noble fir is a limited range species that has many of
the characteristics of spruce in that it's lightweight but it's
very strong. It was used to make the plywood that the mosquito
bomber out of Britain was made of and other things too, I'm sure.
It had the characteristic of great strength. It had a very narrow
range from the Columbia River north on the west side of the Cascade
Mountains .

Anyway, the Forest Service in many places got into timber
management activities during these war years. Immediately after
the war the timber activity began to increase dramatically. The
demand for housing is what triggered that. You see, with all of
this low activity during the thirties and the need then for veterans
and others establishing new families, the housing market picked up
very dramatically. Also, with the rise of the standard of living,
the use of paper products (which is correlated to standard of
living) rose also.

So then the public forests were needed, and private industry
began to bid on national forest timber sales, and the Congress
began to appropriate money to manage the timber and sell the timber.
That increased the activity on the ranger districts, particularly

Torheim: those that had a large resource of timber to manage. The budgets
became larger, and Congress appropriated more money for us. That
made the Forest Service grow then over time, but pretty much on
the timber forests. In the Rocky Mountains and the desert Southwest
these activities didn't increase at the rate they did particularly
on the West Coast, Region 6 especially, Region 5 in California,
Region 1 in Montana and northern Idaho, and in Region 4. That's
where the level of activity really increased substantially. It
didn't happen overnight.

It's this level of activity and this change that took place,
from an outfit that protected the national forests, mostly from
fire, and provided service to the recreation user, to a business,
particularly the business of selling timber — preparing timber for
sale and selling it and then being sure that the resource is
perpetuated under sustained yield principles over time. That
brought about reforestation programs, and, of course, all the
research and state and private forestry activities that were
related to timber management.

Lage: Did that require a different sort of preparation for the rangers
or had the ranger always had a lot of diversified preparation?

Torheim: Well, this is interesting. It depends on where you went to

school. If you went to school at Oregon State, the University of
California or the University of Washington you could land on your
feet, as we used to say, because you got well-prepared in those

universities to manage timber. If you didn't, it was difficult.
M

Torheim: These timber management districts began to generate a lot of
dollars. The Congress appropriated dollars to produce timber
sales. They began to get larger staffs and more technicians and
more foresters, so these so-called timber forests and timber ranger
districts became rather sizeable business enterprises. In the
meantime the bulk of the Forest Service in terms of numbers of
national forests — for example, the Rocky Mountains and the southwest
and other parts of the country in the East and South — didn't have
this same accelerated activity. It was substantially larger than
it was prior to World War II, but there was not this dramatic
change in activity. So we found that the Regions 6, 5, and 1 grew
very much faster in terms of people and budget than did the other
regions in the Forest Service.

That meant that the recruiting activity picked up dramatically
in the forestry schools. So you found a ranger then, who prior to
the war would have himself and an assistant ranger and maybe a
part-time clerk and a fire control seasonal person, soon had a staff.
That was the job that I had. I was the timber management assistant
in a rather sizeable ranger district. I had assistants to help me
and students in the summer.

Engineers and Foresters: Conflicting Cultures?

Torheim: They began to get engineers to build roads. Foresters used to do

all of this. I was well checked out and had an education in logging
engineering, as did most of my contemporaries. So I used to do

Torheim: the whole job. I'd cruise the timber, and I'd lay out the roads
and the whole works. Then we began to get in tougher country,
and the Forest Service began to get engineers to help build these
roads. Actually, they were much more technically able to do this.
We didn't think so at first, I must say! There was a lot of
conflict between foresters and engineers that lasted for a number
of years.

Lage: Did the engineers bring a background of any forestry?

Torheim: No.

Lage: Or did they come out of forestry schools?

Torheim: No. A few did. There were a few logging engineers who took the

engineering jobs, but the Civil Service Commission never recognized
logging engineering as a professional specialty. There was great
conflict over this between the Forest Service and the Civil
Service Commission for a long time. The forestry schools that
taught logging engineering failed to get the Civil Service to
recognize it as a distinct profession. The closest profession to
logging engineering was civil engineering, but it lacked the
emphasis on applying engineering technology in a forest environment.
Still, civil engineers could qualify on Civil Service examinations
(and logging engineers could not) , so the Forest Service got civil
engineers. The logging engineer got a lot of civil engineering
education, but the civil engineer, of course, got more structural
education, and they were better able to do other things besides
road engineering.

Torheim: There was a lot of conflict between the engineers and foresters.
Many engineers had trouble working under the direction of a
forester. So in many places, engineers were assigned to the
supervisor's office, and they worked out in the forest. Well,
the ranger didn't think he had control then or the ability to
coordinate the engineering and the forestry activity on a given
timber sale.

Then [there] were the pure cultural differences. It was
thought, rightly or wrongly, that engineers had no land ethic.
All they wanted to do was build a superhighway, and the forester
would oftentimes want to modify that. But the rules of engineering
were quite stringent, so there was a lot of conflict.

Lage: Who would make the final decision in a case like that? The
higher-ups would have been the foresters.

Torheim: Yes , but engineering was by that time developing a very powerful
subculture in the outfit, and I must say that the managers who
were foresters didn't really enter into that. They decided that
if engineers were hired to do engineering jobs, they were more
expert than foresters, so by edict they were determined to be the
ones who were even directive in that activity. You have to under
stand something about our old organization, what it used to be.
Staff people, both at the forest headquarters and regional office
really were line/staff in that they had a directive role in their
staff function. I'd like to talk about this a little later on when
we talk about budget because that's where the power was.

Torheim: So the district ranger then had to field all of these staff inputs
as if they were line directed. The penalty you paid for not
[doing this] was not being able to get sufficient budgets to carry
out a job because there was always this club. That line/staff role
was an interesting one.

At any rate, this happened particularly I would say in
engineering, and it also happened in fiscal management — accounting —
particularly where managers who were not foresters let these staff
people — and probably rightly so because they were all very excellent
people — kind of run it. The ranger's input was often in conflict
with the staff's. On many national forests, the style of management
of the supervisor was such that he really paid more attention to
the staff's input in a conflict situation than the ranger's input.
Now, this differed with people, but there were a lot of managers
who operated that way. So rangers had to be very light on their
feet and very adept at trying to work their way through the staff
communication and staff human relations roles to make their rig run.

Lage: You sound like this was where you began to see the people management

was important.

Torheim: You bet! If you got in trouble with the staff person you were
in trouble because there was nobody to take the ranger's side.
So it was difficult. Now, that's the human part of it. In
retrospect, as far as managing the public's business — getting the
best use of the public's dollar and treating the land right — this
worked okay because these staff people were terribly responsible.

Torheim: They weren't out just to do the ranger in. They were really

working from a base of expertise and what they thought was really
for the best. The ranger, being a generalist, couldn't be an
expert in all of these things, even though he took logging
engineering and knew how to build roads.

Lage: But he, as you say, did have more of a land ethic.

Torheim: Yes, but that's funny. When you really got to poking into it,
I discovered that there were many engineers who had a greater
land ethic than a forester. It's an individual characteristic. I
also discovered that many engineers who chose Forest Service careers
rather than construction in private industry did so because they
had a feeling for the land. That's the way it really turned out.
So this was myth.

Lage: Could the ranger have also been more "lost in the forest" —

thinking about timber management rather than land ethic?

Torheim: Yes, right, and this is where the term "saw log" forester became

such an epithet from certain interest groups. But these kinds of
absolutes when you dig into them really don't stand up, as we
know. But anyway, if you have those perceptions, you work around
and work in the context of those perceptions, and it does affect
your behavior. So it did affect our behavior.

Strength of the Multiple-Use Ethic

Torheim: Anyway, these timber management districts and forests — I don't
know what percentage of the total forest activity or national
forest activity there would be — but [it was] rather small in terms
of numbers. Just think, we're talking about the west side of the
Cascade Mountains in Northern California and the Sierras, some of
the eastern Washington, eastern Oregon, Idaho, and Montana, and
that's it.

Lage: Not typical Forest Service.

Torheim: No, but the people working in these areas thought that was typical
Forest Service. I used to meet people on fires. The great
melting pot was on fires. You went to a fire and people came from
all over the country, and then you began to be able to compare your
activities with activities on ranger districts in the South or the
Rocky Mountains or wherever. Then you began to learn that there
were a lot of people — and I'm speaking about people at the ranger
district level early in their career — who really would never move,
they said, to Region 6. "That big timber activity simply dominates
everything, and you really can't be a multiple-use forester, can
you?" they would say. Then we would say, "What's your budget?
How many people do you have?" So there was a lot of bantering
that took place. But even the bantering had some elements of
serious thought behind it.

Lage: Would you agree that multiple-use ethic wasn't as strong in these

regions?

Torheim: I think that varied. I would say this. In my own experience it
was hard to maintain the multiple-use ethic on a district that
had a high quota for timber production but still didn't have the
numbers of people and budget to carry it out. I'm speaking now
of the early fifties, that period right after the war when the
Congress really didn't provide all of the dollars that were needed,
but yet we had a contract with the administration, with the Congress,
to produce certain allowable cuts of timber. The way we got that
job done (and we, of course, would never do that today) , we would
locate timber sales on paper after a general reconnaissance of the
lay of the land. Then the timber purchaser, the successful
purchaser in the auction, would lay out the timber sale according
to our paper location with their own people and then would lay out
the road entirely with their own people.

Lage: This would be the private —

Torheim: Private sector. We had no people to do that. Then we would have

to approve it. They had to go by the plan. That's quite different
from the way it was done later where the Forest Service people
actually did all of the layout, marked it on the ground, and the
whole works. However, the demand for lumber and plywood was so
great that was the only way we could get the job done. This didn't
last for very many years, but it shows you the kind of innovative
activity that took place in order to get those kinds of timber on
the market, at least in western Washington and in western Oregon.

Increasing Specialization and_Comp laxity ,_1960s-1970s

Lags: Was the time of this intense activity through the sixties?

Torheim: Oh, do you mean the timber management activity? It goes on today.

Lage: It was continuous?

Torheim: Oh, yes, very much so.

Torheim: No, but then the phase change took place this way. Keep in mind
that the numbers of people on the ranger district were still
relatively small, and they were foresters and engineers. But
then as we moved along in improving our multiple-use management
activities, and as the Congress became more willing to appropriate
other dollars, we began to hire other disciplines — soil scientists,
wildlife biologists, fisheries biologists, landscape architects.
In the business management field, we began to hire accountants
more than just clerical types. So then the job of managing became
more complex to coordinate all of this activity.

Again, these activities that generated the need for these
other specialties, were principally timber sale activities, so
they occurred first on the timber sale districts. This is what
caused the expansion of the numbers of people. That's still the
case because the principal activity on the land which creates a
need for these specialties is the removal of the vegetative crop,
principally timber, and the rehabilitation of it, and starting
the new crop so that it's compatible with all of the other resources
on that forest.

Torheim: This was an evolutionary thing. The engineers came along in the
fifties. The other specialties, in any number anyway as I
described to you, started coming along in the early sixties and
continue today. Now we're even hiring sociologists as this thing
evolves. The complex nature of management, the society and its
complexities and all — the Forest Service has simply been part and
parcel of that. But think of the difference of a district ranger
in 1938 managing 400,000 acres — he and one assistant and some
part-time help — compared with that same district today, in say
a westside Oregon or westside Washington district or other places,
which probably has fifty or sixty people. Of course, they are
doing more, but that's the difference.

Lage: Now, they're doing more. Are we measuring this by how much timber

is being produced or other demands on the land?

Torheim: It's quality. I described to you the laying out of the timber
sale on paper and then the purchaser building the road in and
taking care of the layout on the ground. There was little or no
thought, I mean no intense thought, given to soil erosion, to
stream siltation, to the effects on wildlife, to the visual
appearance. All of those things now are part of preparing a
timber sale, and that's vastly more complex than it used to be,
and the trade-offs. Also, the land that was entered in those
early years were the lower slopes, the easy country as we call it.

Now timber sales are laid out in very difficult terrain
where the chances of damage to the resources are very great unless
you have some really highly technical decisions made. So that's

Torheim: the difference. It's really of quality more than of quantity.

The laws that Congress has passed over the years (and we'll talk
about some of these later), the Environmental Policy Act, the
Resources Planning Act, and the National Forest Management Act,
have also generated judicially decreed requirements on the land.

Land-Use Planning_in the Fifties: Functional Plans

Lage: Okay, if you think it's the time to do this, give us an example
of how a land-use planning effort was undertaken in one of the
earlier periods. Then we can see the increasing complexity in a
later period.

Torheim: I'll give that a try. The planning that was done — and the forester
has done this way back since the very earliest days and I'd say
up into the fifties — were what we called functional plans; they
were resource plans. On a ranger district we would have a timber
management plan, and a very good one. It would lay out the inventory
of the resource and how over periods of time this resource would be
harvested and managed and regenerated.

Lage: It covered the district?

Torheim: It covered what we called working circles. The district was
divided up into geographical units that were most logically
managed for timber production let's say. They were called working
circles. This is a piece of forestry jargon. It's still used, but
not very much. But there would be a timber management plan for
each of these working circles, subunits of ranger districts.

Torheim: Then we'd have a recreation plan, including how summer homes are
to be managed and ski areas and campgrounds and dispersed
recreation and so forth. We'd have a wildlife management plan
and a fisheries management plan (again all by the various
resources), and range management plans and very intensive plans, I
should say.

Lage: Who developed these plans?

Torheim: These were developed by the ranger with, of course, assistance

from the experts in the supervisor's office. A large part of the
staff role was to help with these plans. The supervisor would
approve these plans. The ranger didn't have ultimate approval.
So they were really the supervisor's plans for the ranger
district, prepared by the ranger and the staff.

Multiple-Use Planning and Its Drawbacks

Lage: Did the various functional plans intermesh?

Torheim: That's the next job! Do they intermesh? Well, in the fifties the
vehicle [for coordinating the plans] was designed, and this varied
according to regions. Region 4, the Intermountain region, was
probably one of the leaders along with some others in the Rocky
Mountains in what we called multiple-use planning. Then this
became national policy. This was the vehicle for coordinating
all of these plans so that you didn't engage in some timber
management activity that would have a detrimental effect on

Torheim: wildlife, for example. The allocations were made as to which
areas of the ranger district were to be managed for these
particular uses and where the coordination would be done between
uses effectively. You could, for example, harvest some timber and
maybe improve the wildlife habitat as a result. So you would
use silvicultural techniques then to enhance wildlife. That's an
example.

But curiously enough, the multiple-use plan was made entirely
by the ranger. I say "curiously" in retrospect. It didn't seem
curious at the time. You'd have the resource plans approved by
the forest supervisor, and yet the ranger had responsibility for
the multiple-use plan to coordinate all of this.

Lage: What time period are we talking about? After the Multiple-Use

Act in 1960 or before?

Torheim: No, before. Usually the laws emanated from things already started
by the Forest Service, and the laws were passed to make that public
policy.

Lage: So the ranger devises on his own the —

Torheim: No, no. Nothing was devised on one's own. We had manuals and
handbooks galore. They were originally conceived in that
fashion, but soon, as the Forest Service has done for all the
years, things developed in the field that are good practice become
policy and then it becomes standing operation procedure. That's
the way this happened. Albeit there were differences between regions

Torheim: as to the form that these took, but the multiple-use plan was

the coordinating mechanism, and I'd say a pretty good one. Then
the Multiple-Use Act came along and required this. So it became
the law to do this .

Well, it worked fine except that what really happened so
often was that the multiple-use plan was really never used much
because the conflicts between uses would overpower the multiple-
use plan. For example, in a timber district you'd be substantially
budgeted for timber, but you were under-budgeted for the other
activities. The Congress was unwilling and still to this day is
reluctant really to balance out the budgeting between the various
resources. It's not nearly as bad as it was, but gosh, the money
we got for wildlife, for recreation, for range management was a
mere pittance compared to the budget for timber management.

Lage: The plan was there but more on paper?

Torheim: Yes, it was difficult to actually do the coordination, particularly
on the timber district, because, with that overpowering timber
management budget, and with the budget comes a goal — to produce
the timber — it was very difficult to still do anything effective
in the other areas. This was solved later on with the concurrence
of the Office of Management and Budget and the Congress by putting into
the cost of timber sale activity those coordinating costs which
many of us in the field thought should have been in a long time
before that. I'm really speaking of history now. This doesn't
occur so much today. But before, they were all separate pieces you
see.

Torheim: The forest supervisor really wasn't pushing the multiple-use

plan so hard either for the same reasons. It was the ranger's
responsibility. In the sixties, as it frequently happens in the
Forest Service, as I mentioned before, dissatisfaction began to
occur at the ranger district and forest level about this way of
doing business. In the Forest Service, changes most often take
place from the bottom up rather than the top down. That's just a
natural organizational phenomenon, but this is especially
prevalent in the Forest Service. This dissatisfaction then, as
it usually is, was not turned into disruptive organizational
activity, but into suggestions for change. The Forest Service
typically has done this, too: people would experiment on a given
forest or a given ranger district with a different way of doing
things before it was adopted [nationwide] .

So Region 5 and to some extent Region 6 and I imagine other
places in the Forest Service too — the informal communication system
was getting the word through — decided that there needs to be a
better way of planning, that land allocation just wasn't getting
done through the multiple-use planning process. As we moved ahead
in timber sales, for example, you just had to accept what happened
rather than laying out way ahead of time just exactly how the
resources were going to be allocated. The multiple-use plan wasn't
really serving as a coordination mechanism.

Lage: Was it pretty much a yearly plan also?

Torheim: No. These were long-range plans. Timber management plans are
ten years. Other plans have various planning periods. The
multiple-use plan was revised periodically too. It's not static.

Field Experimentation in New Planning Techniques

Torheim: In the later sixties, then, this dissatisfaction resulted in

certain forests, probably on their own actually in many cases,
experimenting with something different, until finally in the
seventies Region 1 and Region 6 and probably some other regions
too began to experiment with land management planning that was
really allocating the resources by planning units rather than
having a multiple-use plan do that. So that whole drainages would

be planned for all of their resource activities. Then the thought

•
was that someday we could put all of these together, all of the

resource allocations together, instead of having a separate plan.
That's just now coming to be under law, interestingly enough.

But this began to take place and after some experimentation
and some differences and the natural conflicts that arise when
there are differences between how regions go about it, the
Washington office took this over then and said, "This is how
we're going to do land management planning."

But there were still differences between regions, and some
regions had gotten in so deep (particularly Region 1) that they
had great trouble modifying to a general land-use planning format
that the chief wanted for the whole country.

Lage: Is there a difference between land-use planning and land

management planning?

Torheim: Yes, my nomenclature is a little bit loose. It's really land

management planning and "use" is probably too specific. We kind
of use this jargon pretty loosely. It's land management or
resource management planning, that's really what it is.

Public Involvement in the Fifties: Local_and_Unstructured

Lage: Let me ask you another question about the earlier period to get

a contrast because public involvement becomes so important in the
later period. What kind of input was there from the public in,
say, the fifties in developing these plans?

Torheim: Very little.

Lage: Of any sort?

Torheim: Yes, it was very local and not structured. The Forest Service

through its decentralized organization has always been very close
to the public it serves, but over the earlier years mostly
locally. So local people who were interested of course were
involved — sometimes more informally than formally--and state
legislators for their district _if_ they were interested. But it
was only on an "if you are interested" basis.

Lage: Were they involved in the sense of having a conference with the

district ranger?

Torheim: No, not so much. It was kind of "what do you think about this?"
and "do you have some inputs to make here?" Most of this was
really done over the years in the range management plan because
the user had so much influence upon how that plan was carried out.
Probably in range management planning the user had more to say
than anybody else.

Timber management planning varied some according to the
interest of local people. That was usually through organized
recreationists — outdoor clubs, sportsmen's clubs, and this sort
of thing. Then where there was conflict, these kinds of people
representing their group would get involved, again in kind of an
informal way. The ranger would go down and meet with the group
and get their input and probably make some modifications. But
it was not structured, and it was done because the ranger was so
close to the action and the people as well.

Lage: Would the ranger develop contacts deliberately with, say,
mountaineering groups?

Torheim: Oh yes, yes, and this varied again.

Lage: So they knew the people?

Torheim: Yes, but I would say that the forest users probably had the most
influence. The public at large was not well represented and
didn't seem to be interested. This, as a ranger, used to worry
me and others. We used to try all kinds of techniques to get the
public interested in the management of the national forest, and

Torheim: we were always frustrated that we couldn't get that interest

generated. And now look how it is! They're so interested that
you can hardly figure out how to handle it.

Lage: Now you're frustrated that they are interested!

Torheim: Yes, it's hard to manage. We used to talk among ourselves a lot
about this and we would devise all kinds of I & E (information
and education) techniques that were well established in all regions,

Lage: What was your reason for wanting to get them involved? Did you

think you would come up with a better plan?

Torheim: Yes, and we thought that since we were serving the public, and

they were our employers, they should have that interest. We felt
that just a few of us working on a ranger district shouldn't be
making all of these decisions simply by ourselves. We wanted a
broader base of understanding.

But we didn't really invite their interest as we look back
in retrospect. We didn't invite involvement. We usually made up
our minds what we thought ought to be done as professionals, and
then we went out and tried to sell people on it and say, "don't
you agree?" or "isn't this good stuff?" A lot of them would, as
a matter of fact. Not all. As I say, occasionally there was
conflict and we really honestly tried to solve that. But we had
no techniques for doing that. It was rather crudely done, albeit
we surely made the attempt.
##

Lage: I was interested in what you were saying about public input in

the earlier times, in the fifties. The impression I've gotten
through reading was that foresters sort of fell back on their
expertise and didn't want the public involved that much and
resented it at the later date when the public more or less
demanded it.

Torheim: In my experience, just the opposite is true. Now, that's not
to say it might be true somewhere, but quite the opposite. I
don't mean just my personal managerial responsibility, but I mean
all the other people I knew in the units I worked on were that way.
Let me give you an example, and this would be typical.

Public Input: Yakima Valley Elk

Torheim: When I was ranger at Naches on the east side of the Snoqualmie in
the Yakima Valley, one of our biggest resources there was a large
herd of Rocky Mountain elk — well, several herds. Now, we worked
closely with the Washington State Department of Game in managing
those animals, the state being responsible for managing the
animals and the Forest Service being responsible for the habitat.
So we had to work very close together, and there was always danger
of the elk getting too numerous and overgrazing their habitat.

To help us, and the Washington State Department of Game too,
to get some feedback on hunting seasons and the condition of the
range and the numbers of animals, we would typically, with the
Washington state game representatives, go to the Yakima Sportsmen's

Torheim: Club. We wouldn't wait for an invitation. We would go there
annually or more frequently and get their feedback. We would
have elk feeding stations in the winter on the national forest
and we would invite citizens to come out. But it would usually
be sportsmen. We had an annual elk count. Again it would be
sportsmen. We never got any feedback from anybody else, except
the organized Yakima Sportsmen's Club.

Lage: Who were interested in hunting.

Torheim: Yes, and the propagation and perpetuation of these elk. We and
the state knew that the newspapers and the radio stations would
certainly be interested and would cover it. But we could never
get whoever the public-at-large was. There was a public-at-large,
but they weren't organized to communicate. We had a few individuals,
and they were motivated people who didn't belong to anything, and
they would give me plenty of feedback. William Douglas was one
of these, Justice Douglas.

Lage: On this particular issue?

Torheim: On every issue. Justice Douglas was interested in the Naches
district, particularly because he had his summer home at Goose
Prairie. But it was difficult to get input from the public.

William 0. Douglas: Naches District "Assistant Ranger"

Lage: Do you have anything further you want to say about those early

experiences with Justice Douglas?

Torheim: As most folks know, Justice Douglas grew up in Yakima and his

interest in the mountains were just like mine as a young person.
He would come back frequently, and he kept a particular interest
in the Naches and Tieton districts, these two Yakima Valley
districts in the Snoqualmie forest. I remember one instance. As
I told you earlier, we used to have trouble getting budget dollars
for things other than timber. The Naches district had over 450
miles of trail to maintain, and I was trying also to reconstruct
some trails that were left from the old mining days and were
unsafe. There was one trail in particular that went from Goose
Prairie up to American Ridge. It served this general area
including a Boy Scout camp and a lot of recreationists , and it
just happened that Bill Douglas's place was nearby too.

So by golly, I remember that it didn't look like I was going
to get the dollars for that. I hope later on we talk about the
budgeting process, how it used to be and how it is today, because
it's terribly important to learn about that in the context of
history. [see pages 69-73]

Anyway, this was on my work list, and I submitted it for a
couple of years to the supervisor and never got a nickel. Then
it turned out that all of a sudden I got some money — the whole
amount — to reconstruct this trail. This is how it happened. I
don't think that the supervisor ever believed me when I said I
didn't lobby Bill Douglas for these dollars. But what happened
was that two women owned the Double K Dude Ranch (and still do)

Torheim: at Goose Prairie, and they were interested in perpetuating the
trails and improving them because they took guests every year,
including the American Forestry Association Trail Riders , on
summer trips. This trail would be a much safer trail for their
use and for the Boy Scouts. They were old friends of Justice
Douglas. They lobbied him. Justice Douglas went to the chief
of the Forest Service, who then went to the regional forester, and
somehow an agreement was made that the Naches district ought to
get these dollars.

Now, the sad thing is though that no extra money was
appropriated by the Congress, so it had to come out of somebody
else's hide. I never knew whose, but the supervisor had this tough
choice. So it didn't help the Forest Service any, but it was
interesting to see that somehow the influence of Justice Douglas
made it possible for me to construct that trail, which was very
much in the public interest as far as I was concerned.

Lage: Well, that's public input.

Torheim: Yes, that's public input. I guess some would say today that that's
special interest input. [laughs] But that's the great American
process. Apparently, for $6,000 or something like that, nobody
really wanted to get Justice Douglas's back up. It wasn't really
worth that, I guess.

Another personal sort of thing. Justice Douglas in the summer
used to travel a lot as we all know. He took hikes here and there.
He used to occasionally go overseas. One summer (I think it was

Torheim: about 1955 I would guess) he came back from Nepal, and he wrote

me a letter. He asked me if I would go up into the Bumping River
country come fall and collect some bear grass seed. He had been
traveling in Nepal, and he saw some country that looked just like
the Cascade Mountains east of Mount Rainier. He was just sure that
bear grass would grow very well there. So he had contacted some
botanist over there who thought the same thing. So by golly, he
asked me if I'd collect some bear grass seed, and then he gave me
the address that I should send it to, which I did. But I never
did hear whether that bear grass grew or not! [laughter]

That's the way he was — very direct and he'd always relate to
that part of the country.

Lage: So he knew you directly from your activities —
Torheim: Yes, he knew every ranger there. No matter how long you were
there, he would get acquainted with each one that came along.
I am sure other rangers have had similar experiences. No, he was
a very human person to deal with. He spent a lot of time in the
district — horseback trips and that sort of thing. He was very
interested in the management of the district, very much wilderness-
oriented as we know, and somewhat opposed, I think — although he used
to go about it in rather left-handed ways — but rather opposed to
commodity use of the forest. He wanted to be sure it didn't
dominate the activities. He was a great proponent of wilderness.
It was kind of interesting. I used to call him my assistant
ranger because he kept very close track of everything that happened
in that district. Well, that's just a little aside!

III LAND MANAGEMENT PLANNING, 1970s

National Forest Management Act: Forest Service Input

Lage: We were comparing the early planning efforts with the later
planning efforts .

Torheim: Of course, then that brings it up-to-date. The important thing
is that it was really an evolution from resource planning, which
goes way back to the early beginnings of the Forest Service and
was essentially that until the fifties, to the first attempt to
coordinate these resource plans into multiple-use plans, the
passage of the law by the Congress which legalized that [the
Multiple Use Act, 1960], and now the National Forest Management
Act [1976] which further legalizes but spells out very specifically
how this planning should take place.

All these processes were developed from the ground up and
finally formed into legislation by the Congress using the
experimentation of the field, not designed at upper levels and
then handed down to be implemented, which is interesting.

Lage: So you would say the Resources Planning Act and the National Forest

Management Act grew out of the experience and needs of the grassroots
Forest Service.

Torheim: That's exactly the case, you bet.

Lage: So the Forest Service was in agreement with the new requirements
placed on them.

Torheim: Absolutely; we helped formulate them. The Congress added its own
dimension to them, though, that makes it different. For example,
the Congress in the National Forest Management Act was quite
specific. The National Forest Management Act, of course, emanated
from that problem with the Organic Act in the Monongahela case,
put the urgency behind having something like that as law. Had
we not gotten that case and the act, I would venture to say
that the process would be essentially the same.

The RPA [the Forest and Rangeland Renewable Resources
Planning Act, 1974] grew out of an earlier effort by the Forest
Service to put together a program of work planning and budgeting
over time — an environmental program for the future — that actually
the congressmen picked up in whole and made into the Resources
Planning Act, again with the help of the Department of Agriculture
and the support of the administration. The Forest Service doesn't
do it all by themselves. I suspect that lots of legislation comes
about in that fashion. The Clark-McNary Act did way back in 1924.

Lage: Then there's other input as well, I'm sure.

Torheim: Yes, and that's what makes the difference. The flavor of it then
becomes more public because other interest groups get to make
an input, and that's the way it should be.

Lage: That's an interesting evolution. It certainly made a difference
in the way things are done.

Torheim: Yes, I think it's for the better because it does put into law, and into
regulations that emanate from the law, the way the national forests
should be allocated and managed. That takes away a lot of the
worry that many of us had about making these kinds of decisions
without the public policy being defined, and it should be.

Lage: Do you think that your view is the typical one, that you welcome
a more rigid —

Torheim: Oh, yes. Well, it's not so rigid. As a matter of principle I

think most of us would agree. There are some individual differences
of opinion on the specifics because, particularly on the National
Forest Management Act there was great conflict among the user groups
and interest groups about howthe regulations should be stated.
But that was because there was so much conflict in the way the
legislation was put together, a tremendous conflict. So the
legislation was a compromise by the Congress. Then the interest
groups sought to get regulations formulated out of the legislation
that would espouse their own point of view. So this again became
compromise. So at least I think it makes it better for the manager
on the ground in these complex times to know what the direction is.

Lolo National Forest Plan, a Case Study

Lage: Do you think we can take a recent land planning effort that you've
been involved in and talk about how experts are used, how the
public is involved, and how the data is gathered? Would that be
useful?

Torheim: Yes, we could give it a shot. I wonder how to narrow down the
universe. It becomes such a complex thing. Let's see, where
should I start? I was involved right up until the day I retired
, in the land management planning effort for the Lolo National

Forest in western Montana. I just learned here last week that
it's about to be completed, and it will be the first plan completed
in the United States under the National Forest Management Act.

Lage: The National Forest Management Act was in '76, so this planning
effort went on for several years.

Torheim: Oh, yes. It's a perpetual thing. Of course, the National Forest
Management Act caused many changes to be made, so in spite of the
act being passed in '76, the regulations under which the activity
is carried out didn't take place until just a little over a year
ago. The regulations are the trigger, not the law. So this is
quick; we did this in anticipation that the regulations would be
coming out soon.

The Lolo was selected. Each region, by the way had one or
two forests selected and agreed to by the chief to be the first.
Well, there is inherent competition between units of the Forest

Torheim: Service. So many of us, being in Region 1 and being the "Number-one
region," were insisting that we have the number-one plan. We broke
our backs a bit to do that. But that's just the natural competition.

From Unit to Forest Planning

Torheim: First off, the plans [formerly] were not made by entire forests,
but by taking units of land on a national forest. Some forests
had as many as twenty or more units. Then there was kind of a
forest plan that put them together so to speak. Well, the National
Forest Management Act required — and by the way we were already
evolving toward that — that a plan be made for each national forest.
Then you could have sub-units naturally, but the plan would be for
the forest. Then there would also be a regional plan to put all
of the forest plans together. In addition to that, the plan was
related to RPA [Resources Planning Act] and eventually to the
budget process. So it all becomes one system.

In the Lolo Forest they were nearly completed with their unit
plans, as we call them. So we took and bagged those all up and
devised a system to put the unit plans together and make the
forest plan.

Public Involvement in Determining Issues

Torheim: Now, the forest plan is built around what we call issues. That's

the starting point. The issues introduce the public to the process.
The issues come out like this: What are the areas of concern in

Torheim: the Lolo Forest that you, the public, either organized or not,
consider to be those things that need to be dealt with in an
allocation plan? They can be very specific, such as "what are
we going to do with the Rattlesnake Creek; should it be wilderness
or it should it not be wilderness?" to as broad a topic as "what
should the allowable harvest levels, annual timber cuts, be on
the forest as a whole?" and then everything in between.

These issues were first generated by the forest supervisor
and his staff and myself as regional forester and his staff. The
forest supervisor and I came to a tentative agreement of what are
the issues. Then the forest supervisor goes to the public in formal
meetings and lays this out with a lot of homework, of course, and a
lot of publicity and [makes] very much available the issue that he's
generated to them, and gets feedback then.

Lage: Tell me who the public is?

Torheim: The public is anybody who wishes to come.

Lage: Is this a public meeting?

Torheim: Public meetings were scattered all over the Lolo Forest at the
smallest communities to give everybody a chance to come in.
Usually they are formulated into workshops. You have to have a
mechanism. People just don't come and work unless you have some
way of doing it. So the technique that we used, and many other
units do this for this kind of public input, is to have a workshop.
People will gather together. Most times the groups in the workshops
are made up of people with conflicting interests. So this
generates some synergism, and you get a pretty good answer from them.

Lage: Are you looking for data from them?

Torheim: Not at this stage. We are saying, "What are the issues? Let's
agree on the issues." Of course, the public is invited to write
in. A lot of people don't want to attend meetings and make inputs
in that way and many do .

Lage: How do you reach the public to invite them?

Torheim: It's done through public notice, and mailing lists, and the

newspapers, the radios. If anybody is interested, there is plenty
of opportunity and plenty of time. I must say at least in the
state of Montana, with the very high level of interest in national
forest management, it wasn't difficult. It varies throughout the
country. The same in northern Idaho, which is part of our region,
and North Dakota, so we had no problems with that.

Evaluating Public Involvement

Torheim: But at any rate, this generation of issues then is very important
because it is what eventually the plan will speak to. Then the
supervisor gets all this input and formulates a new set of issues
based on the public input. There is some sophisticated approach
made to counting public input because it's such a laundry list,
and this has been developed over time.

Lage: Is this a regional development?

Torheim: No, this is national. The processes of evaluating public input
have been pretty well generated through Forest Service efforts
with external help from the universities, because there is no

Torheim: body of knowledge that we could draw on at all. I remember when
we first began public involvement, public input, in the RARE I
process — Roadless Area Review and Evaluation — how we naively
went (and I went personally) to the University of Oregon, the
sociology department. We said, "Now, Mr. and Ms. Sociologist , why
don't you help us out?" They said, "There is no body of knowledge
here. We can createwaysof gathering public input. We know all
about questionnaires, and we know about polls, but then you have
to evaluate it."

Anyway, this has changed over time. The university has
become interested. There has been some research and that sort
of thing. So anyway, public input is evaluated, and the issues
then are finalized to a number that can be dealt with. For the
Lolo Forest, -I think it was something between twelve and twenty
issues. Then this is circulated again. We say, "These are the
issues. How do you feel about these now?"

Lage: Again are they variable in terms of the breadth of the issues?
It can be a very specific question or —

Torheim: Yes, most of them are broad so they can be dealt with because the
objective is land allocation. But each forest usually has what
we call a sensitive area or an area of high public interest, where
the interest is so intense it has to be set aside. The Rattlesnake
Creek, even though it's one drainage, had national interest even
in its allocation so that it was set aside as a special area for
consideration in the planning process.

Torheim: I can't get into all of the technical details of the process,

but anyway, these issues then really formed the skeletal framework
for designing the plan because it would speak to these, and land
allocations must be made to give some solution to these issues.

Then [comes] the process of inventory which is still difficult,
and assigning the objective of the plan and then the RPA (what we
call desegregation of goals, of mostly outputs) has to be
integrated into that. So it's a very integrative process that
only computers can do. There is a lot of alchemy that takes place
here unless you are a computer technologist.

At any rate, the important thing is that the regional
forester personally and the forest supervisor personally sit down
at check points along the way of making these decisions and all
along the way there is public input at periodic intervals. So
that's the system. Of course, I left before it was finalized,
but the plan, as I say, will be coming out. It will, along with
the forests and the other regions that were selected initially,
become the model. Naturally, the interest groups that had much
input into the National Forest Management Act — the outdoor interest
groups, the Wilderness Society, the Sierra Club, and the commodity
interest groups are all watching this very carefully. So it's
done in a big glass bowl — intentionally. They're all watching
this, so I'm sure a good product will come out.

Torheim: Now, think how different that is from the multiple-use plan that
was created at the ranger district, signed off by the ranger with
probably the local input from ranchers and forest products people
and some recreationists , compared now with each plan being a
national sort of thing.

Forest Plans and the RPA: An, Iterative Process

Torheim: Now then, the regional plan is really built out of the RPA and
drives the forest plans. The difficult chores are to take the
commodity outputs and service outputs of the Resources Planning
Act and then desegregate them to the forests within the context of
their land resource base that gives them the ability to carry it
out. It is very complex.

Lage: Are the output levels predetermined before you start on your forest
plan?

Torheim: Well, they're negotiated between the regional forester and the
forest supervisors. The regions' output levels came out of RPA
before the National Forest Management Act. It has to be an
iterative process to distribute the outputs to each national forest,

Lage: Iterative?

Torheim: Yes, where you have to cut and fit, so to speak, and you kind of
work your way up in increments, and it develops. You bounce one
against the other and keep building, instead of empirically where
you [develop output levels] just by formula. It's a mathematical

Torheim: way of negotiating I guess you might say. The important underlying
principle is that the product and service output levels must be
realistic and compatible with the capability of the natural resources
on the forest to produce and provide.

Lage: This is all computer-based I would gather.

Torheim: Oh, the data and the varieties of data are so complex that without
the computer none of this could be done. But to reduce it to
what the Congress intended — the Congress intended that the Forest
Service budget be not just an annual thing but be a five-year thing
based on ten-year assessments of the resource base in the country,
and that certain outputs should be made and funded using good cost
accounting principles, but within the ability of the land to
produce those outputs. That's what the plan does. So the plan
then allocates according —

Lage: Is this the regional plan?

Torheim: The forest plan. The main plans are the forest plans. The
regional plan is simply an umbrella to put them together for
communicating with the Congress and the chief and the president.
So it's usefulness, then, when the forest plans are put together,
is to take the RPA outputs and actually allocate them to the
forest, only again within the context of its ability to produce.
It becomes then a two-way vehicle; it allocates the resource, and
then it forms the basis for Congress to appropriate the dollars to
carry it out.

Lage: We're talking about a number of different resources here.

Torheim: Oh yes, all of the resources in the national forests, every one
of them.

Lage: They're all put into dollar value, recreation, wilderness...

Torheim: That's where it becomes difficult and probably always will be.
The outputs for timber and for grazing are finite and easy to
compute, easy to identify. But what about recreation, dispersed
recreation? How are you going to evaluate that — number of
visitors in the wilderness, for example? The wilderness doesn't
even have to be a wilderness. Is that a measure? Wildlife
habitat? How do you put a dollar value? A lot of these unit
measurements are still being developed through research.

Lage: Is the public involved in those determinations, like how do we
judge the value of the wilderness?

Torheim: Oh my, yes, I should say so. The Wilderness Society and the Sierra
Club are clear up to their necks in this. We rely heavily on the
public. The public is very much in the Forest Service's business,
and I think this is terribly healthy. It's working very well,
especially now that Forest Service managers have become very
comfortable with dealing with the public. I don't mean comfortable
meaning no conflict; I mean comfortable in the manager's ability
to deal with the conflicts that naturally emanate from different
interest groups.

Lage: Was that a difficult process, having them become comfortable?

Torheim: On my, it was terrible.

Lage: Do you think they are comfortable now?

Torheim: Oh, yes. I mean comfortable with their ability to carry it out.
Conflict I wouldn't say is ever comfortable, but conflict has
become a way of doing business. In fact, you'll find now managers
are even inviting conflict and stimulating conflict. Now, I
don't mean disruptive conflicts. I mean differences in points of
view that really result in a better decision. Some of our managers
even go out and invite conflict by structuring public inputs so
people of different points of view can get together. So this is a
pretty mature way.

Team Management, Conflict or Concensus?

Lage: Could this give the expert a little more power also? If you have
conflicting interests balancing off against each other, does the
expert get to come in with his point of view?

Torheim: Yes, this is a dilemma. This is the modern management dilemma in
the Forest Service, if I understand what you're talking about.
Maybe we could digress a little bit here. I mentioned earlier that
the forester had an education and experience to do everything in
managing resources, but as the job became more complex and the
stakes became higher, and the Congress appropriated dollars for
higher quality of work, we began to employ other professions.
Then the ranger's job became ultimately more complex, to take the
input from these experts and come up with a consensus to result
in a plan of action.

Torheim: As long as there were just a few — for example, I told you about
the conflict between the engineer and the forester —
*f

Torheim: — two people can usually resolve then what course of action to
take, particularly, say, on a timber sale for a road location,
albeit sometimes the engineer would, with his support from the
supervisor's office, win out.

Let's compare that with the ranger district later on. It
had a wildlife biologist, a soil scientist, and a landscape
architect. Well, let's just use those for examples. Now, all
of them participate as a team to put together a timber sale or any
other activity that has an impact on the land. Their job is to
come together with a consensus for a plan of action. But when you
think about it, these expert specialists came from different
backgrounds of education. They didn't learn in their professional
discipline leading to a baccalaureate degree in school, that they
had to compromise, as they would call it, their professional
opinion. They learned quite the opposite — to stick with their
professional opinion and with great conviction see that it's
carried out.

The problem with resource management is, though, being very
complex, certain trade-offs have to be made. You can't manage,
for example, a timber sale strictly to get the maximum wildlife
because you probably couldn't even build a road to it to get the
timber out. There has to be a consensus of opinion that optimizes

Torheim: all of those activities. So you have these people working

together on the ranger's staff, men and women as a team, and
they'll not come to a decision because they have all of these
minority reports. Well, the ranger sends them back. He can't
arbitrate between all of these, so he sends them back. Then they
come up with a consensus finally, and it becomes a report. But
then some of them will go outside of the organization and lobby
in the public arena quietly for their own position, usually through
an interest group that really supports the maximizing of their
particular resource.

Lage: So you have people from within the organization?

Torheim: Yes, this is very foreign in the Forest Service, but it's under
standable when you get a mix of people like this. I think it's
the way society is heading too in many ways with more and more
specialists; these people with great conviction really believe it's
unethical to compromise, as they say, their professional judgment.
They honestly feel that this plan is going off in the wrong
direction.

So think of the dilemma, then, of the manager trying to get
all of this together and then dealing with the conflict that
results generated by some of his own people. I don't mean to say
that this happens all the time, but there's enough of this
activity around that it's something every ranger with any kind
of business activity at all has to deal with periodically. That's
quite different, you see, from what it used to be.

Lage: Is that officially forbidden in the organization, this going

outside and lobbying?

Torheim: Well, what can you do?

Lage: Is it frowned upon?

Torheim: Certainly. It's an anti-organizational activity, but it's not
illegal. It's not something you can fire somebody for unless
they're overt about it. The way society is today there is some
condoning of that. It's usually looked on by some as whistle
blowing. So the interest group that supports this minority opinion
would fight to the bitter end to keep this employee from being
fired, naturally . So that usually never becomes an issue. I don't
want to convey the idea that this is happening all over the place,
and it's all disruptive. I don't mean that at all. But the point
I'm trying^ to make is that there has to be a change, and it's
taking place slowly.

The first thing that has to change is (and I used to advise
college deans that were in the resources field), they've got to
begin at the college level to educate the specialists that they
may wind up (whether it's private or public) in team types of
activity because that's the way the world is put together today,
with experts , and that they will have to come to a consensus if
they want to work in an organization. At the same time, I used
to encourage our forest supervisors and district rangers to learn
how to manage this. Some would just draw the curtain and blow.
They have to anticipate it. They have to give the specialists some
time to learn the process, and they themselves have to learn about
the process of team activity, that it is difficult.

Learning the Art of Personnel Management

Torheim: Now, this is just 180 degrees away from where the Forest Service

used to be. It used to be that would be completely not tolerated.
In fact, the ranger would just not be a ranger if he could not
really run the rig, so to speak, and keep his people in line.

Lage: So there's a lot more people-managing?

Torheim: Yes, it's tougher now and much more complex. But again, it

illustrates that the art of management has to be relearned, and
there has to be a continuing kind of learning about this as things
crop up.

Lage: Is the ranger given specific training, personnel training in
managing his staff?

Torheim: Yes, more so than it used to be. It used to be just learned by
experience. I expect maybe that's still the most learning that
takes place, except a lot of this is on-the-job training and also
there are a lot of continuing education opportunities and learning
by experience and, oh, some of them come now with pretty broad
backgrounds from universities more than technical training. But
it's mostly learned really on the job.

Lage: Is the ranger's job now a higher level job than it was?

Torheim: Oh, yes.

Lage: You must work many years before you become a ranger now.

Torheim: That varies some. I worked five years and became a ranger. But

my grade level was GS-9. That's the entrance level for some people
today. If they have a master's degree it can be.

Lage: How long would the average person work today before becoming a
ranger?

Torheim: Probably ten years. There are exceptions all over the map, but
I'd say probably ten years. Now, that's not true in some ranger
districts in the Rocky Mountains and the Southwest where they
still have a rather low level of activity in terms of people and
resources. There probably are many people making ranger in five
years there, but they would have to move off to other places
before they could really move on to a higher grade level. Now
we have three levels of ranger depending on the work load — grade
11, 12, and 13.

Lage: You'd almost have to.

Torheim: Yes, that's how the change has taken place.

Lage: If you have several experts working under you, and you are
coordinating their activity.

Torheim: When I started, we had two kinds of rangers. We had what we called
the subprof essional ranger and a professional ranger. You see,
when a lot of the folks came into the Forest Service, starting in
the very beginning days of the Forest Service and up into the
thirties, they didn't have to be college graduates to get a sub-
professional assignment that might even lead to ranger. So we
had two kinds. We had the SPs and the Ps . Many of these sub-
professionals, right after World War II, were converted to
professional positions.

Lage: Would this be the time to talk in any more detail about computers

and their use in land planning? How the various computer programs
are devised and how they are accpeted?

Torheim: I think I'd like to talk about computers from the point of view
of management and not limit it to land-use planning. There's
kind of a story chapter on computers whenever that would be
appropriate. We'll talk about the management of information systems,
which includes computers .

Washington Office Guidance for_ Land Management

Lage: I'm looking forward to that. To finish up our discussion about

land planning, what has been the guidance on these plans from the
Washington office? I read a very interesting pamphlet that the GAO
put out (I think it was in '78)* where they analyze the progress
the Forest Service had made toward fulfilling the RPA. They were
a little critical of the fact that the land planning effort seemed
to be going off in all different directions, and there wasn't
enough guidance. Now, would you agree with that?

Torheim: Oh yes, very much. In my judgment I don't think that on a national
basis we really got hold of this as fast as we should. Things
were moving so rapidly though, it's not hard to understand. As I

*General Accounting Office, The National Forest — Better Planning
Needed to Improve Resource Management, 1978.

Torheim: described earlier, these changes in planning techniques and the
change from multiple-use planning to land management planning
were born of frustration at the field level, that the multiple-
use planning process was not working like it should. So the Forest
Service being very decentralized, of course, is quite capable of
beginning experimentation without any blessing from on high as
long as you stay within your budget, and a complex unit can do
that. Now, there is informal communication that takes place so
this isn't done in secret, but it just doesn't have holy water on
it. It isn't in the manual is what I'm saying. So usually,
through the informal process and oftentimes formalized by letter
if not in the manual, the unit or region or forest would be given
license to experiment and try it out. And that's pretty good. I
think if an organization isn't willing to experiment, then change
never does come about, any kind of meaningful change that the
outfit will accept.

Uniform Work Planning: Imposed from Above

Torheim: In the 1960s we had a system called "uniform work planning." It
was developed at the top levels of the Forest Service and passed
down to be implemented. It was a new way of doing work planning
as compared to the old way which I guess we'll talk about a little
later. I'll just use this illustratively.

Lage: Give me a date on it also.

Torheim: I'm just getting the date — 1959. I was just leaving the ranger
district and going to the staff job on the Rogue River. My
district at Quinault was one of the experimental districts, but
again this was formalized experimental (top-down). I remember
I couldn't move to the Rogue River until I completed that uniform
work planning. The next year then I was in a staff role and it
was SOP — standard operation procedure.

But by golly, through the years of uniform work planning,
which weren't too many, it was changed every year. It was never
accepted in the field. It was done by rote simply as part of the
budget and allocation process and put in the drawer and left.

Lage: It didn't relate to the program decision?

Torheim: No, because you could go ahead anyway, and cuff records were kept.
The field didn't see that it was useful to the carrying out of
their business, although I am sure it was useful at higher levels
perhaps for budget development; I would guess it could be. So I
think probably in that experience (and I don't know this for sure,
but I think so) enough people were dissatisfied that it conveyed
the idea that really things ought to start from the bottom, up.

Land Planning: Experimentation in the Field

Torheim: Also, and I'm sure we'll talk about this later, we began to get
behavioral science inputs into our techniques of management. We
probably overdid it a little bit because one of the principles
there is participative type of management — to let the user be

Torheim: involved in the development. As often happens when you take on
a new technique, you go too far.

Putting this together (and I'm making some assumptions here),
there was great license given informally and to some degree
formally, for regions and forests to experiment with land management
planning because it was agreed that multiple-use planning was not
working. So as a result, Region 1 getting started the first,
eager, had hundreds of units. Some of our national forests in
Region 1 had as many as fifty or sixty units or more. Just think
how long that would take, small units of land.

Lage: Each one developing a plan?

Torheim: Each one developing a plan, a full blown plan for that.

Lage: This is what time period?

Torheim: This is in the early seventies, '74, '73 and on into '76, until the
National Forest Management Act came along. Other regions, like
Region 6 here, had not that many but quite a few and then elected
on their own to consolidate because they saw that it wasn't
working. Then the method of the technology of planning was not
well developed. So there was experimentation in this and this
was done differently all over the place.

Lage: A different computer program?

Torheim: Oh, yes, different computer programs with high ownership in your
own methodology — the not-invented-here complex, the NIH factor,
all that, all the things that organizations characteristically go
through when they're free to do their own thing and then later

Torheim: find they have to put it together. They have a high sense of
ownership because they put so much into it of their own
creativity, and that's something that you can't pull back too
well. So this is the way it went, and that's why I mentioned
earlier that I think the passage of the National Forest Management
Act and RPA and the regulations, the need to get some uniformity,
were things that people accepted because nobody liked this lack
of uniformity. That's why the forests, including the Lolo in
Region 1 that I mentioned, were selected with the regional
foresters, the forest supervisors, and the chief together, to be
formally the first forests. It was under the guidance of the
Washington office to put it together.

Lage: And serve as an example.

Torheim: You bet, and this was done nationally. All these forests were
doing their first plan, but it was coordinated and communicated
between regions.

Lage: When you moved from Region 6 to Region 1, did you notice a big

change?

Torheim: Oh yes, oh yes. We had some changes to make, some of which were
already underway.

Lage: What types of differences were there in the land planning?

Torheim: Region 1 having gotten the first start had all of the small unit
plans. The supervisors were not terribly satisfied with it, but
they had gone so far they were reluctant to change. Some forests
that hadn't gotten much of a start didn't have any trouble. But

Torheim: what we did was to consolidate units drastically. That was

started before I got there. Then, interestingly enough, we had
two forests that all this time unit planning was being done, were
doing a forest plan. This was the Beaver Head National Forest in
Montana and the Willamette National Forest in Oregon. This was
done, formally approved by the chief as an experiment, while
unit planning was going on to see how the forest plan might work
out. Concurrently with this, the timber management plan was being
done on the forest at the same time. So there was, you see, a
little background even before the requirement in the National
Forest Management Act. But this was done by design.

The Plan and Program Decisions in the Fie^ld

Lage: How did these elaborate land management plans relate to the

decisions that the rangers are going to make, the program decisions
in the field?

Torheim: They relate very well, and when they're completed probably even
better. Even the multiple-use plan did to that extent, although
as the resource management job became more complex it became less
useful, but the multiple-use plan did that too. It relates when
it comes to doing an activity on the ground and I'll keep referring
to timber management not because that's the only activity of the
Forest Service, but because probably it has the most profound effect
on all of the resources, and it does take the coordination of all
of the resources, and because it's in a short enough period of time

Torheim: that you can see the results. But it doesn't mean the other
resources aren't involved too.

The timber management plan and all of the other resource
plans now, under this new system, need to be subordinated to the
land management plan. In other words, the land management plan
makes the allocation, and then the resource plan is carried out.
But of course, realistically it doesn't happen that way entirely
because the timber management plan, having been generated over
time, contributes to the decisions made in the land allocations,
so they're together. But eventually when that first plan is done,
then the resource plans will reflect back on the land management
plan.

Lage: Will the resource plans still be long term?

Torheim: Yes.

Lage: Will they cover the same time periods as the land management

plan?

Torheim: Yes, right, and they will be part of the land management plan.
That's the important thing. They'll be chapters of it so to
speak, yes. But this initial goal, you see, has to put the two
together so it's not quite a classic model yet, but that's the
way it will be. In fact, that's the way it is working. A timber
sale, for example, would be guided by the timber management plan.
The timber management plan, though, was guided by the land
management plan which allocated this particular area for timber
use, but also speaks to the other resources and how they too

Torheim: should be allocated, so that the trade-off that I talked about
earlier are made in that timber sale to optimize all of the
resources according to the plan. Or sometimes one resource is
maximized if it's a critical resource.

So the land management plan then really guides it. Now,
another interesting feature is that the public who had a large
hand in this is going to be looking over the manager's shoulder
to be sure it's carried out that way, and I think that's very
healthy. There's a lot at stake.

Lage: So how might the district ranger's role be changed or altered in
some way by the land management process? Does the district
ranger then have less discretion than he used to in managing the
district?

Torheim: Yes, less independent, unthought-out discretion because the plan
is a forest plan. But the ranger, if it's done right, had a hand
in its preparation. He didn't actually prepare it, because that's
the supervisor's and staff's job, but you can't do it without the
ranger's participation because he has the most intimate knowledge
of the land and he has to make inputs at both the inventory stage
and trade-off stage when it comes to optimizing various resources.
So he should, if it's done right, regard it as his plan because
he had a hand in putting it together.

Now I think, just people being people, this might not always
come out in the classical sense because certainly I think I would
have to expect that there would be some rangers who would be

Torheim: somewhat less interested in a plan than some others, and there
might be some forests that would involve the rangers more than
some other forests. You know all the human foibles that you get
into in organizations. But that's the way it's supposed to work.
I know in putting together the Lolo plan that the entire forest
was very much involved and the rangers indeed did feel ownership
of that plan to carry it out.

Allocation and Funding under the RPA

Torheim: The real proof of the pudding though is in the allocation and
funding process. If the allocation of funds out of the budget
doesn't come somewhat close to the plan or at least follow the

plan in the trade-offs between resources, there's a danger it

•
seems to me then that cynicism will develop in the field. The

cynicism would result in "the plan is just a paper plan." I

hope that doesn't happen. I think with the RPA it's not so likely

to happen.
Lage: If it happens is it because Congress doesn't come through with

funding?
Torheim: We can't lay it all on the Congress because the Congress in recent

years has been more generous than the administrations have been.

The Congress has seen fit in the last several years to appropriate

more dollars for national forest management than the administration

has put in the budget.

Lage: When the plans are being developed, what attention is paid to

the promise of getting them funded? Do you have an eye to that?

Torheim: Yes, the RPA is the guide for that, and it's five years out. The
president adopts the RPA and presents it to the Congress, and
that's a five-year program. So that's really the benefit of the
RPA. It used to be in annual increments.

Lage: When you're doing the land management plan, you're going to have

some idea of what funding you'll have?

Torheim: Yes, that's correct. Yes, integrated into it. The RPA is
integrated into that. That's an important part of it.

The Budgeting and Allocation Process, Pre-1970

Torheim: Perhaps, Ann, this would be a good time to describe the old process
of budgeting, do you think, as compared to what we just talked
about?

Lage: Yes, I think it fits right into it.

Torheim: It's quite different. It's tremendously different. When I was on
the ranger district (and this is typical) . This would take us
from the very early days of the Forest Service up to the end of
the sixties, the budgeting and allocation process was essentially
the same. The ranger really had nothing to do with it formally.
Now, informally the ranger would communicate (and I'll elaborate
on that a little bit) , the basis for getting work done on the
ground was through what we called a "project work inventory."

Torheim: This was an inventory of jobs to be done, all kinds of jobs on
the national forest as monies became available to do them.

The difficulty was prioritizing, or to translate them into
budget requests. This was done, but the ranger was really never
much involved in that. That wasn't the ranger's role. So the
staff then played an important part beginning at the forest level
to put together budget proposals, but really the job was done
mostly at the Washington office and the regional office. It was
done by staff who then were line/staff. As I mentioned before,
they had directive authority for their particular activity like
fire, timber, wildlife, range and so forth.

Each ranger district had a work load analysis which was
used to budget the basic management activities on the district.
This was called the "base funding level." The work load analysis
was updated periodically. Project activities, such as recreation
facilities construction, range revegetation, and timber sales
were summarized in the project work inventory. These were budgeted
on an annual basis. The region and forest line/staff had great
influence on the budgeting and allocation of these "project" funds.

The problem that the ranger faced was that each year, at the
beginning of the fiscal year, he'd get dollars, and they'd all be
labeled as to what they could be used for. His job then was to
make those dollars work. Now, they would vary from year to year
sometimes and wouldn't always equate with the work force that he
had, and there was great trouble financing the work force. Many

Torheim: people had to be laid off in the winter or work on other activities.
The ranger was cutting and fitting, and then his goals were
determined by the dollars that came down to him. He didn't have
goals that were financed and a contract made as it is today through
a plan.

Power of the Staff in Allocating Funds

Torheim: So here's where the problem came in. A good ranger would negotiate
informally with staff people in the supervisor's office. He would
convince through deed mostly and guile if he didn't do it entirely,
that the dollars allocated to the district were really producing
a lot of timber sales. My unit cost was low, and my quality was
high, and so really if the forest supervisor wants to spend his
bucks wisely it should be on my district. He should fund me with
the full amount that I think I need.

Lage: So you're in competition with your fellow rangers.

Torheim: I'm in competition, right, but the staff is the key. He's the
guy that doles out the money. When it finally comes, it comes
out of the appropriation and was dealt out all down the line. Then
it was up to the supervisor through his staff to allocate it to
the districts, and that's when you got your bucks.

Lage: But each staff member had a particular interest. Is that right?

Torheim: Yes, but the monies came that way. You see, the monies still do

[come] from the Congress with labels on them — you know, fire money,
wildlife money, timber money, recreation money and so forth.

Lage: Then each staff person could give so much fire money to each

district?

Torheim: Yes, right.
Lage: That sounds like a lot of politicking.

Torheim: It was.
##

Torheim: The ranger then, of course, had the duty to get along with the
staff person, but he also had the duty to get a high quality job
done, at least cost on the ground. I mean you couldn't just talk
your way into getting dollars. So there was a lot of effort made
to do a good job, and particularly to convince the staff. Now,
sometimes interpersonal relationships, in spite of the quality you
might be accomplishing, would interfere, as it does in human
endeavor, so really you didn't want to get all crossed up with the
staff person because he might then get negative vibrations about
you and might not really agree with you that the quality is all
that good. So negotiation on the same basis was done between the
supervisor, but through his staff with counterparts (the assistant
regional foresters in the regional office) and they with the
Washington people. So the staff people, from the Washington level
down through the forest, were quite powerful, and there was a lot
of job satisfaction to being a staff person that way because you
were expert in the field, and you helped the ranger, but you also
had a little power which you lost [in the seventies] when you were
no longer line, that you had as a director of activities in a staff
position.

Torheim: I don't mean to caricaturize this really, but that's just the
way that it worked. Well, it worked quite well actually as far
as getting the job done because the staff people got there because
they were experts. Really it was not too hard then for a ranger
to move into a staff job with that kind of a role because he can
kind of play ranger for six districts instead of one, although
there is a lot of conflict that goes with this. But he could do
it; he had the authority.

Lage: It sounds like you people do have a good background in conflict

resolutions !

Torheim: Oh yes, and what I don't want to do is caricaturize this. I'm
emphasizing this only because that ingredient of management is
not written about much but really is what makes the rig run. It
also keeps people's interest up, instills loyalty and has a lot
of good features. But then as the world around us became more
complicated, this kind of thing became more disruptive. It got
too big. When you have a small number of people and a small
output, you could live with this. But gosh, you couldn't live
with this system very well when you had big outputs and lots of
people to finance. It's just an awful job.

Motivation for Forest Service Reorganization

Torheim: So tomorrow I'm sure we'll get to talk more about reorganization,
but let me introduce it this way. One of the motivating forces
for reorganization was to change this staff role from line/staff

Torheim: to staff, and take the directive role out of staff, but put the
responsibility then with the line more directly. One of the
necessities was to devise a new budgeting system and a new work
planning system that would get away from this negotiation between
line and staff.

Lage: So the staff of the supervisor no longer could allocate the
money to the rangers.

Torheim: No.

Lage: And the supervisor himself allocated it?

Torheim: Yes, but it's done now through a system, a planning-budgeting-
programming system, and that's the difference.

Lage: What effect did that have on the morale of the organization?

Torheim: Well, it affected a lot of staff people very negatively. They

thought that the really important features of their job were cut
out. The assistant regional forester for fire management became
a director of fire management. Some other changes took place, too,
in that their roles were described as not being directive anymore.
So they felt, "Well, god, the forest supervisor can do any damn
thing he wants, and all he'll do is he'll just throw quality out
of the window in favor of production and by golly, the regional
forester won't even know what's happening." Well, it didn't
really.

Lage: What responsibility did they have then?

Torheim: No, let's take an example, the fire one again. The fire management
director used to be able to tell the forest supervisor, to direct
him to do this, to do that. The fire management director would

Torheim: also allocate the dollars to the forest supervisor. The new role
was that he could not direct the supervisor to do anything. The
regional forester and deputies could direct. The budgeting and
the fund allocation was done through the regional forester and
deputies and was done through the system that we'll talk about
tomorrow.

Now, his input was that of an expert. You know the realities
of life are that a supervisor and the people on the ground who
wanted to do the best quality would certainly do nothing to
alienate that staff man and prevent him from coming out, he and
his staff, to help them do a good job because that's where the
expertise lies.

Some people perhaps overplayed this directive versus non-
directive role and that's been sorted out. People are more
comfortable in their roles now than they used to be, I'm sure.
But for the transition period — where one day a person was assistant
regional forester for fire management and the next day he was
director of fire management and seemingly didn't have much of
this authority anymore but only really functioned as an expert
to the forest and, of course, the staff person to carry out the
regional forester's policy, for instance — some people were in
their own head really dramatizing it, and so it took away a lot
of job satisfaction. This occurred at the Washington level as
well.

Lage: They had the same change then?

Torheim: Yes, they had the same change.

Lage: Was this related to putting extra deputies in?

Torheim: Yes, it was all part of a massive reorganization in the Forest

Service from top to bottom. But this is a budget example only,

Tomorrow we can talk about some of the other things around

reorganization .

Lage: And more about how the new budget —
Torheim: Yes, and the new system. We need to talk about how the new

system works.

Lage: Okay, shall we stop here?
Torheim: Yes, okay.

IV MANAGERIAL METHODS AND STYLES IN THE FOREST SERVICE
[Interview 2: March 14, 1980]##

Hierarchical Structure, Authoritarian Management, 19 20- 19 50s

Lage: We were going to start out this morning talking about managerial
styles and how they've changed.

Torheim: Okay, let's see how we can handle this. Oh, a bit of historical
perspective first of all that even precedes my interest in the
Forest Service. The Forest Service in the twenties, right after
World War I, adopted a lot of the style and organizational
structure of the military. There was good reason for this. Many
of the folks in the Forest Service who were in high management
executive positions served in the military during World War I.
Many of them schooled in forestry or engineering had served in
the military. So their management styles were already well-honed
to the military experience. Also, the type of work the Forest
Service did, and especially fire control, lent itself well to
the military style of organization and management techniques.

So although not patterned directly, there was a lot of the
military influence on the development of the managerial systems
and styles during the twenties.

Lage: Did you have career officers coming in?

Torheim: No, they were people with experiences like my own in World War II,
who were foresters and had been in the Forest Service and then
went off to war and came back. Others had a military experience
and went to school after World War I. But significantly, they
were in the policy making positions and the Forest Service was
very young yet, you see, and so a style and techniques were
still being put together. Even the Forest Service uniform to
begin with was a military type of uniform.

Pioneer in Scientific Management

Torheim: Then along about the beginning of the thirties and into the

thirties, the Forest Service executives began to adopt early for
a government agency, it seems to me, some of the scientific
management techniques that were developed even prior to World War I
and during the twenties. They fit well with the Forest Service
mission and with the early military type of organization I spoke
about.

The Forest Service even then in the thirties pioneered (for
government anyway) much of the management techniques, and they
were things like directive systems (formal), work load measurement,
and planning that emanated from that, project work inventories
and that sort of thing. The Forest Service was very decentralized
early in the game, so this worked well too. So the Forest Service
in many ways, for the government at least, did some pioneer
application of scientific management principles.

Torheim: Now then, these principles really were built on a hierarchical
style of management where you had goals to achieve and people
certainly needed to put their personal goals and their
organizational goals together. Authoritarian type of management
was very acceptable. The line and the staff, which came from the
military, really could function that way to get work done at the
lowest level through policy established at the highest level,
through quick communication. It worked quite well.

The type of people that came into the Forest Service fit
this too. A lot of them were woods people and hard-working people,
who put in long hours and had a dedication to the job and the land,
and weren't in it for money. So it was a highly structured
organization. Managers, by today's standards I would say, were
rather authoritarian. I don't mean that's negative, but that was
perfect for the times.

Then the CCC, the Civilian Conservation Corps, came into
being about this same time. So that made the Forest Service a
much larger organization very suddenly. Much of the CCC program
was conducted on the national forests, and it was handled by the
military. So there was a big rush of work to do with all of this
manpower, and the Forest Service was well prepared to do that. So
this simply enhanced the need for this kind of management and the
very structured way of communicating, and the directive system
being put together, and the manual, and how we do things.

Autonomy, within Set Limits

Torheim: Yet there was a lot of personal responsibility given in the

decentralized organization to the person in the field. So there
was a lot of job satisfaction, even with authoritarian-type
management.

Lage: It seems almost in conflict. I'm sure it wasn't in reality.

Torheim: Not if people accept this, that's fine.

Lage: Authoritarian, and yet a lot of autonomy at the same time.

Torheim: Oh yes, right, autonomy as far as making decisions in the field
within the structure of the manual policy. Then the inspection
system kept that thing glued together, a very structured inspection
system. That inspection system was used not only to check out
quality and quantity of activity, but it also was kind of a
coaching tool. It wasn't just an audit. It was used for
coaching and for training people certainly, and it worked very
well. The CCC program also brought about quite a structured
approach to training and the Forest Service mission, especially
in fire control which required (and still does) a very military
type of organization to respond immediately to the emergency helped
[reinforce this approach]. The Forest Service culture was much
influenced by the fire job in these years because most of the job
was protection of the national forests.

So it was all very fine, very satisfying. This increase of
activity in the CCC days of the thirties caused forestry schools
to blossom and bloom because there was great demand for foresters.

Torheim: So the Forest Service grew quite rapidly in that period between
1932 and 1942. I came on the scene then, as I mentioned, about
1940 and '41 and '42, in that period.

Postwar Changes

Torheim: Then my perceptions and those of my peers of what kind of management
the Forest Service had is where I pick up the thread. It was
obvious that these were dedicated, hard-working men, these forest
supervisors and district rangers, that they brooked no nonsense.
You either toed the line or you got out, and that was okay. You
knew exactly where you stood.

After World War II then, most of us rejected the military

life. Of course, the whole society was that way. We got our

•
discharge, we got out, we went back to school, we finished, we got

out and went to work. And then we began to wonder a little bit
about this style of management. I know I did, and I know my peers
did (the new junior foresters that were coming into the outfit) .
We began to — I don't say we didn't accept it. We did, but we
began to wonder really if that's the way it should be. For
example, if a district ranger failed on a forest fire in some way —
made some gross management error — he was really forced to leave
the service in many cases.
Lage: I didn't realize it was that severe.

Torheim: Yes, I don't mean he was fired summarily because the civil

service system provided due process. But they could make it so
uncomfortable that usually a man would seek other employment, or
sometimes if he didn't he'd be relegated to a rather disagreeable
assignment. We observed this in Region 6. I know we had certain
Siberias, so to speak, where rangers would be moved, usually
because they failed on a fire.

On the other hand, if you succeeded in the fire game you
moved very rapidly through the outfit.

Lage: So fire control really dominated —

Torheim: Very much, very much. There was a period in the thirties and into
the forties when many of the Forest Service executives earned their
spurs so to speak early in their careers in fire fighting and fire
management. It's a very difficult and demanding job and a very
fine way to learn how to manage people and programs.

Lage: In that style though.

Torheim: In that style, yes, that's the difference. There were all kinds
of managers, but generally the theme was very authoritarian. In
other words, they demanded that people do things the way they
should and the way that they wanted them to do. The supervisor
was really the person who called the shots.

Lage: Is this the forest supervisor you're speaking of.

Torheim: Yes, when I say supervisor I mean forest supervisor.

Lage: Did the ranger himself follow this type of style?

Torheim: Yes, that's right. But of course, there were a few who didn't
and there was always some conflict. Those rangers that really
had trouble with that kind of style, who wanted to play it a
little looser or use more of their imagination or depart from the
manual really got in trouble very quickly.

"The Way the Rig Ran," an Illustration

Torheim: Let me give you an example with some names. This is not an

aberration either because I'm sure there were lots of similar
stories like this. There was a ranger at Naches on the Snoqualmie
who preceded me. His name was Horace Cooper. Coop was a well-
loved ranger by other rangers and all, but forest superviors had
an awfully hard time with Coop because he didn't fit this mold.
He was a fellow who really regarded the manual as something that
guided his activity, but his view of the manual was that if it
didn't say in the manual "thou shalt not," it was okay. So he read
the manual in quite a different way from most people. However,
his objective was to do a good job of management and he did on the
ground.

Lage: How old a man was he? Was he in your age group?

Torheim: No, he's half a generation ahead of me. Coop lives here in

Portland. I suppose he's about seventy today. We all know him
well and love him dearly. He's just a great person, and he tells
these stories on himself, by the way, so I don't feel uncomfortable
about telling this. But it's illustrative of management style.

Torheim: This was about 1950, I don't know the exact date, but I was a young
forester on the North Bend district so we all knew this story, and
Coop used to tell it. The forest supervisor was a man named Herb
Plumb who came along in the Forest Service early in the game before
World War I. He was typical of many forest supervisors. He
retired about 1952 or '53 or somewhere in there and is now dead.

Well, Herb ran a tight ship. He had been on other national
forests and in the RO [Regional Office] . He was a fine man, but
he was two different personalities. Off the job he was a very
fine social person and just a real fine human being. On the job
he was really a martinet. He ran a tight ship. He and Coop had
opposite personalities, so we had trouble!

The rangers' grades for a long time were P-2 on many districts.
P-l ("P" means professional) was the entrance grade for professionals
and P-2 was ranger. As the work load increased after World War II
though, the classification of some of these jobs caused them to go
up. So some ranger districts became P-3. The Naches district
being a large district rated a P-3. So one day Herb Plumb drove
over to Naches, and he had in his pocket Cooper's P-3 promotion.
He got to Coop's office (which later became mine), and it looked
across the ranger station compound to the ranger's house. Herb
Plumb walked into the office, greeted Coop, and exchanged a little
small talk. The he looked out the window, and he saw a new
breezeway had been constructed between the house and the garage,
which was separate. Now, this is in country that's twenty below
zero and four feet of snow for about four months!

Torheim: So he said to Coop, "Coop, did you build that breezeway?" Coop

said, "Yes, I built that breezeway." Herb said, "I didn't approve
of that." Now, think about that! Today a forest supervisor
wouldn't know one way or other whether a ranger was building a
breezeway, but that's the way it was. Herb, like many of his
peers at that time, knew every facet of every job on the ranger
district. He spent a lot of time in the field. Of course, you
have to put this in the context of Coop being a maverick and
probably Herb also held a rather tight rein on his use of funds.

So then they got into a discussion of no approval and what
kind of funds did you use and that sort of thing. It turned out
that Coop was in the soup one more time with Herb Plumb. So Herb
took the promotion out of his briefcase and showed it to Coop, tore
it to pieces and threw it in the wastebasket, and Coop never got
his P-3 until some time later.

That's illustrative of that style of management. Coop just
didn't follow the processes properly. I'm sure he did a good job
with the breezeway because we lived in the house later on, and you
could walk, even when the snow was quite deep, from the woodshed
garage to the house. [laughs] But there are lots of stories
around like this, and if you talk to other people, you will find
other national forests had the same kind of management style and
behavior and the strict adherence to manual instructions and these
same kinds of things. So that was the way the rig ran.

Torheim: Now then, as these folks that had been forest supervisors and the
like during the twenties and thirties retired, then the Forest
Service's new managers began to change. That's because times had
changed. Younger people coming up, and many of them having been
in the war, didn't ascribe to that kind of management. So there
was evolution in a way from the authoritarian-type of management
to, oh, more of a humanistic I would say [type]. Some of them,
as you typically find, some of them went over the brink a little
bit and got, as a reaction to authoritarian management, a little
too humanistic — some of us thought anyway, if that's possible.
But really there was a mix during the fifties because so many of
the scientific management type of people and some of the newer
people were all kind of mixed together. This was the state of
affairs until the sixties really.

At the same time, the Forest Service really stuck with the
manual and the directive system, and they still do. The use of
work load measurement was refined. Uniform work planning came
into being. These were really merely extensions of scientific
management principles with humanist ics kind of built into the mix,
which meant that the ranger began to participate a little more with
the supervisor in planning together instead of being directed from
on high.

The Work Planning System in the Field

Lage: Do you want to say more about how the work load analysis and the

planning system worked, from the viewpoint of the field?

Torheim: Yes, I'll try that. I probably don't remember all of the details
as much as those who have studied it more. The work planning
system — first of all, you got your fund allocations and then the
ranger and his staff would put together an annual program of work
based on the budget and the allocation of funds, and it was in
much detail. We had ledger-type forms to use. So these were put
together and became the gross work planning for the year. Now,
these were backed up by project work plans, so the detail was there.

Lage: How did they relate to these longer range functional plans?

Torheim: Not very closely because the fund allocation drove the whole

system, and that was an annual thing. Sometimes it went up and
down like a yoyo .

Lage: So the other functional programs that we talked about were more

like dreams?

Torheim: Well, they were wish lists, yes. But they guided the activity. We
didn't stray from those, but we only did the increments of those
plans which the funding permitted and it would vary.

Lage: So they were long-range goals which may or may not be worked towards,

depending on the budget?

Torheim: Yes, if you didn't make it this year on your trail construction
program, you hoped to get money next year and get a little
farther. Sometimes you kept slipping back, which we did in

Torheim: campground activity. Campground improvements were built in the
CCC days. We didn't get the money to maintain them, and this is
still a problem, by the way.

It was very structured, but worked quite well I must say. The
project work inventory that each ranger district had was a list
of things to be done that was updated periodically. So you had
lots of things to dip into that were real and you could cost them
out. Then the work plan for the year was put together and all of
your people were funded. Many of them were only funded for part
of the year and only worked part of the year. We had lots of
seasonal employees.

Then that was translated into monthly work plans. We sat
down — the ranger and his people — each month and made a monthly
work plan by day, everyday — what you were going to do everyday —
and out of what fund you were going to work and what you were
going to accomplish. Then you'd have a contract so to speak with
the forest supervisor. The staff, of course, would join in too
in the supervisor's office. But that was your contract and at the
end of the month you went down through it with your people, and
you checked off in red what you accomplished and what you didn't,
and you made a new plan and picked up those things or some things
would cancel out or change or you had a fire and you had to delay
the whole thing and do it all over. But it was done by days.

Phasing Out the Diary

Torheim: Then for many years, Forest Service employees kept daily diaries.
The daily diary served a number of purposes. For one thing, it
was used to account for your time on your work plan, to account
for your time on the payroll sheet, and to let the supervisor
and the staff know, if you just sent the diary in every month, what
you did. Then it was used for future work planning as well — how
long does it take to do a job? It also served as a useful record
and reminder, particularly for rangers in their contacts with
permittees, if there is a dispute or something later on, or if
you want to recall something.

So all of us, or most of us, made diaries for many years.
Many of these are in the archives yet today. They form a useful
source of history.

Lage: Would you say that would be an accurate historical record? Did
people really put down exactly what they did?

Torheim: That would vary with the individual. Some people were very
creative about their diary writing.

Lage: [laughs] I like your terminology.

Torheim: Yes, some people didn't like to write diaries. I remember one

fellow who had his clerk write his diary all the time. He would

tell the clerk periodically what he did.

Torheim: But generally the diary was used appropriately. I know in my own
experience, I didn't make lengthy narratives (that wasn't the
intent of the diary), but I noted, and I know my colleagues that

Torheim: I worked with did, what we did during the day. We put down the
functions account too if that were appropriate.

Lage: Was that well accepted or did people gripe about it?

Torheim: It was well accepted until the fifties again. We began to change,
and there was a lot of dissatisfaction about the diary, as we
moved along particularly in the fifties and sixties, and finally
the diary was abandoned. You know, we'd never think that the
diary would be abandoned. But it didn't get abandoned without
pressure from the bottom. It got abandoned because it wasn't a
useful tool anymore, and we got into a different kind of work
planning.

Lage: Was it abandoned along with the work load analysis and other
things that it tied in with?

Torheim: Sort of. I probably am a little fuzzy on the history, and it

didn't just stop forthwith. It varied. Again, experimentation
took place. Most change in the Forest Service begins with
experimentation. Only certain individuals were required to keep
a diary. Then for a while selected positions just for historical
purposes kept the diary. Then finally it was just wiped out
completely. By that time, though, there were things to replace
it like a little modified budgeting process, more participation
up and down the line, a uniform work planning system which was a
pretty good one but didn't work because it was developed at the top,

But in a way, this was an evolutionary period between the
more directive type of management and the — I use the word
"authoritarian" for lack of a better word — but more directive

Torheim: really is what I'm talking about. I don't mean authoritarian

in a negative context at all. It was simply that the person who
was forest supervisor or ranger had a lot of power and exercised
it overall, I'd say, wisely.

Participative Management and Management by Objectives

Torheim: There was an evolution then, you see, between this type of work
planning I was talking about and the present system which is
related to land management planning and is much more complex and
it's computer-based.

Lage: Can we get into a description of that?

Torheim: Yes, I probably won't go into it in detail because it is quite
detailed, but let's compare it with where we were.

Lage: Is that management by objectives?

Torheim: Yes, it's all tied together. The system is still being perfected,
of course. But generally speaking, the budget is now put together
three years out, and it's even more than that. It just gets a
little less accurate as you move out, but it's tied to the Resources
Planning Act, which is a five-year plan.

In land management planning the ability of the land to
produce or provide services is considered. The interesting
difference though is that the ranger and the forest supervisor
participate together with their staffs in the formulation of these
plans and budgets out over time, based on objectives that are also
jointly agreed on up and down the line, and related to the RPA.

Torheim: The Congress, having passed the RPA, has a certain commitment to
fund at these levels, that didn't exist before. There is still
conflict between the executive branch and the legislative branch
though when it comes to trying to beat inflation and prioritizing
this. At any rate, it's quite different in that respect.

Then the ranger — having participated (and it's updated
annually) in the objectives to be accomplished and the funding
required to do that and the people power to accomplish it — has
ownership. Then there are no surprises. You get funding
estimates that are fairly close to the budgets that were submitted.
So you can really plan out ahead instead of just starting from
scratch each year.

Now, they always don't turn out exactly that way because
priorities aren't always the same at the national level. At any
rate, it works quite differently then, so that the ranger indeed,
in comparison with the past, can really be participative in the
formulation of the budgets which resulted in fund allocation, and
then he can expect that over a period of time they'll generally
be carried out.

Lage: Does he have any more discretion in how he's going to use the
money that year or is it still allocated —

Torheim: He has more discretion. There are certain rules of the game, and
most -of them are by law and regulation on fund integrity, because
it relates to how the Congress appropriates the money. Those
rules are well known. But there is more discretion in putting

Torheim: together the budget within those guidelines by far. As compared
with the way it used to be, when it was done really at the
supervisor's office and at the regional office's level and simply
handed to the ranger. He didn't participate formally like he
does today. [He] merely competed for funds, as we talked about.
The staff assists the ranger doing that and doesn't direct
him. I don' t think they play quite as many interpersonal games
as there used to be.

Lage: So the ranger before, it sounds as if he did have some power, but

it was on the informal level of gamemanship.

Torheim: Well, yes. He didn't think he had power when it came to fund
allocation because the staff really had command of that. But
that's not true anymore. It's in the line now between the super
visor and the ranger, with much help from the staff. The staff
really makes it work. That's the basic difference I'd say.

Lage: Is there a milestone date or approximate time span for these

changes to more participative management?

Torheim: Approximately 1965 to the present.

Introducing Behavioral Sciences into Management

Torheim: Now, management styles, of course, have changed, too, to make this
possible. Again, they're evolutionary, and they change among
people. One of the profound events in my judgment that took place
in the Forest Service and made the Forest Service managers able
to cope with the rapid change in the social structure in the country

Torheim: and recent legislation was the introduction of behavioral sciences
into management. This happened again, as it often does, not in
a planned "let's do this" sort of a way, but again through
individuals becoming interested, and then the time was right.

I think I can describe that to you because I was a part of
that activity. Keep in mind the background again of new people
coming into the organization, many having been in the military,
the old style of management disappearing and new kinds of people
coming into the Forest Service, more than foresters — other
disciplines — that's all part of the background.

In 1964, the director of personnel management in Washington
was a man named Hy Lyman who had come up through the ranks and had
always been interested in management as a science and an art and
was interested in the business of management, in addition to having
been forest supervisor and ranger and all those sorts of things.
So he had a more than usual interest in this subject. (He was
director of personnel management.)

The people in personnel at that time in the regions and in
the Washington office, were not all personnel types. When I say
that I mean professionals with an education and background in
personnel. The Forest Service had quite a mix, and I was one of
those. They had lots of foresters who had moved over to personnel
management [who] really had experiences in the field personally
too. Among those there were also some professional personnel
people who were being moved into the outfit. They had a greater

Torheim: and deeper knowledge of personnel systems and of human behavior
and psychology.

Lage: They came out of the business schools?

Torheim: Right, or they came out of political science or all kinds of

places — liberal arts types. So there was this mix. The training
arm of the Forest Service was used during this period to effect
change. They were kind of a licensed change agent. Now, I say
this only in perspective because it didn't seem so at the time,
but as I look back now it seems that this was the focal point.
That's where the interface took place between people who had
technical backgrounds like myself, and people who were coming
in new in the outfit from universities and [who] had contact with
behavioral sciences.

Lage: When you .say "the training arm" was that a certain division?

Torheim: Yes, it's part of personnel management — employee development and

training still is there, and most personnel departments have that.
The Forest Service was always very strong in training and still is.

The Managerial Grid Training System

Torheim: It just happened that the kind of mix of people that were interested
in this happened to be in the right places for something to happen,
and it happened this way. Hy Lyman and some of the folks in
personnel management, and some of the interested other staff people
in Washington went to a managerial grid seminar. This seemed to
put all of their latent feelings about organization management into

Torheim: a formal focus in a laboratory setting, highly structured, that
they could understand. It seemed like it would surely work well
for the Forest Service in these changing times, of trying to get
the various disciplines working together (they weren't just
foresters anymore), team action, participative management, and it
seemed good to them.

They selected a couple of regions who had regional foresters
that were known to be people who were also interested in management
and experimentation and might be willing to try it out. So they
went to Region 1 where Neil Rahm was the regional forester. Neil
had always been interested in the business of management. In fact,
he was kind of an experimenter himself, and the region was a region
that had that kind of culture. So with some help from the
Washington office then, Region 1 was going to try out the managerial
grid with groups of people and see how that would work.

Regions compete, and so some of the other regions also thought
it would be a good idea. I was the chief of the employee development
branch in Region 6, and Dan Bulfer was the regional personnel
officer. He was an old fire man and trainer and everything else.
He didn't like to see Region 1 going off into something he thought
was pretty good and not have big Region 6 also have an opportunity
to do that. I was new in heading up the training branch, and I
kind of felt like Dan did. This looked interesting to me, and we
had a group of people in the region who had also been kind of
chipping away at old traditions. You can't do this just in the

Torheim: regional office. These were forest supervisors and rangers, and
they were all well known to us.

Our regional forester was Herb Stone. Herb was near retire
ment and had been around a long time. Herb was a very open-minded
man who liked to try new things too, so Dan's job, with our staff's
help, was to convince Herb that this would be a good idea to
experiment with, and he bought it.

Then some other regions here and there got involved too.
Some regions thought this was a bunch of junk and just rejected it
completely. Anyway, this caught fire. What helped it along, in
my judgment too, was the Job Corps that came into the Forest
Service's realm of responsibility at exactly the same time. It
was a very difficult program for us to manage because it was really
a social program. It wasn't like the CCC program. We thought it
was going to be. But it was really to permit young men — unemploy-
ables--to become employable. It wasn't to get work done in the
woods .

They came from the darndest social background and troubles
and, gosh, we had all of the human problems you can possibly
imagine.

Lage: Did you have rangers in charge of Job Corps people, or did you have

specially trained people?

Torheim: Well, we had a mix. In Region 6 anyway, we chose our very best
young managers in the field to go into Job Corps and manage
these centers, and it was a good thing we did. But the Job Corps

Torheim: staff weren't from our culture at all. They were educators, they
were sociologists, they were psychologists, they were people
from the penal institutions all over the country. They were the
people that came into the Job Corps to do the work. They were
managed, though, by Forest Service managers. We selected young
managers that we felt might go on up, and they just weren't
equipped, especially to work with this disparate group of people,
to run a center (Job Corps camp) .

So the managerial grid and the introduction of behavioral
sciences through this method seemed to work very well, and it
coalesced and made it possible for these units to work together
to accomplish their goals.

Lage: So you used the managerial grid in the Job Corps units?

Torheim: You bet, right.

Lage: How did it work? Can you tell us more about what the managerial
grid is?

Torheim: Yes, the managerial grid was simply a system of training managers
in what I call participative management. Now, that's an over
simplification, but it's a way of learning how to work together
with people to accomplish the organization's goals. It teaches
teamwork, and it teaches the synergism of people getting together
without all having the answer and through the synergistic
interactions of this group, it can come up with better answers
than the sum of the whole. Of course, this fit the Forest Service
needs to a "T" because this was the way the Forest Service worked.

Torheim: We never had a vehicle to do it, nor did we have the understanding
of how people functioned this way.

There were some elements of sensitivity training in it which
later were at least modified by us . A lot of people rejected it
on that basis. I must say it wasn't a large part of the managerial
grid, but at least it caused people to interact with each other
on a personal basis to see how they really felt about each other
working in a team.

Lage: How did that go over? I think this is referred to in one of the

other interviews where he describes it as sort of a lengthy session
of several days of interaction.

Torheim: It was very, very, very tiring. But if you think it was tiring for
the participants, you ought to see how tiring it was for those of
us who conducted it. We conducted many dozens of training seminars.

Lage: I would think it would be very hard for sort of a traditional
Forest Service type to accept.

Torheim: That's why it was hard on the people conducting it. It just tore
the outfit apart sometimes. People had well-established niches
or they had pretty solid coats of armor around their personalities,
and it was just all laid out. We modified it in Region 6 though
because that didn't seem to be terribly important. We didn't
want people to modify their behavior, and we didn't think it was
possible. We felt the psychologists were wrong there. It turned
out that that's the way it worked best.

100

Torheim: One thing you could do with the managerial grid was to actually
modify it to suit your own needs. Now, the first seminars were
simply to learn. The real payoff in managerial grid though was
the subsequent follow-ups where you worked with actual working
groups. The first session was a laboratory mixed bag of people
from all kinds of units. The real payoff though was in what we
called "phase 2s" and "phase 3s" and on, where you dealt with a
facilitator. The training people and others learned to act as
facilitators. You worked with an actual group, a ranger and his
staff, a forest supervisor and his staff, or groups of people that
worked together. They worked on real life problems and, with the
aid of the facilitator, learned how to work them out together
better.

Lage: You were sort of along while they were doing their routine work
to help them?

Torheim: Yes, we had sessions, but they'd bring to the sessions the real
life things they were working with, and that was the payoff. If
there hadn't been a managerial grid, I suppose over time some
other techniques [would have been] used. But that opened whole
new doors. It opened up the outfit to the use of consultants
from universities, other than the forestry faculty. It got us
into schools of business, of public administration. It got us
into private industry, which was also doing the same thing, by
the way .

101

Longterm Benefits from Managerial Training

Torheim: It just opened up the interaction of managers at all levels to the
world around them much larger than just managing the national
forests, and that was a profound change. Coupled with the Job
Corps, and the selection of our best people in this cauldron of
management activity who now had moved up to executive positions,
it put the Forest Service in fine shape for the resource conflicts
which have come along since then, particularly in the wilderness
issue and timber management issues and that sort of thing.

Lage: Would you say it was more successful in training your younger
people rather than changing the behavior of more established
people?

Torheim: Yes, it didn't change the basic behavior of the established, but
many of the established people really modified their behavior
within the context of this because it worked. Another thing you
saw was that people out on the outer fringes, the typical change
agents, were going a little too fast. They were leaving folks
behind, so they had to kind of back off. There's a tendency, at
least in the Forest Service there always has been, that when you
get something new that works, we just jump over the cliff. Then
you find out you jumped too far and too fast and you haul yourself
at least halfway back up to reality and then get on with it. We
did this too. A lot of it was over done. This turned off a lot
of people, particularly the critics who said it wouldn't work.

102

Torheim: But the payoff was, at least to getting the whole organization
into this way of thinking, is that it became a way of doing
business. I don't mean only the managerial grid, because that
was just a vehicle to learn, but the participative type of
management, the ability to deal with conflict, the ability to
understand group interaction and what's really happening to your
group, and then stop the action and critique it and say, "We're
getting all hung up" — that was a new business. Usually you kept
all of this inside of you and hoped you could work it out through
your force of personality or intellect. It particularly fostered
an ability to deal externally with conflict and not be all torn
up about it or go into a shell, but actually nurture it with the
idea that this is going to work out good.

This all came about over a period of time up through the
latter half of the sixties and into the seventies as a way of
doing business. But what really institutionalized this way of
managing was that those managers who really had accepted behavioral
science techniques as a way of managing seemed to be the ones who
were getting promoted. They were the ones that were actually
producing and getting credit because they were better managers.
This became very obvious then [that] this is a way of doing
business. The heads of the agencies — the chief and the staff and
the forest supervisors and the regional foresters — accepted this
too. So again, it started really from the bottom up.

103

Torheim: The last folks, I would say, to really accept this as a change
of style were the people at the Washington office. But that's
only natural. The felt need was at the ranger district level.
You had new people. You had a whole mix of people other than
foresters. The conflicts were there, and could be dealt with.
And the younger people, the people that are always
tapping on the egg shell. In my judgment (and I think others,
probably in my peer group, would support that), I think that was
a milestone of change in the way the Forest Service has done its
business.

Adapting to Change, Dealing with Conflict

Lage: I would think that your peer group would be a key group, as the

•

ones who came in under the old style, but had to adapt.

Torheim: Yes.

Lage: Did you find that a lot of them fell by the wayside? If they had
been attracted to a certain style in the Forest Service, how well
did they do when it changed so drastically?

Torheim: That was a highly individual thing, I'm sure. It's hard for me
to say. I don't know of anybody falling by the wayside so to
speak, although there must be some who did. When I was in personnel
management, I began to learn about these things personally for the
first time. You don't otherwise so much, but in personnel management
lots of people came to consult with me about their careers. It
had nothing to do with change so much but just careers in general.

104

Torheim: There were a lot of people who were not achieving their career
expectations, and this is true in any organization. But I was
never so aware of that until people would come to see me because
of my job. We'd have a chance to talk and look at the alternatives,
I think perhaps this abrupt change — I shouldn't say abrupt, but
a rather short span of time anyway — this change from a more
structured type of management style to a more open style really
did trouble some people and made it difficult for them to move up
because they were already locked into the old style of management.
That was standard procedure for them.

Lage: Also, I think it fits with a certain personality structure that's

hard to change.

Torheim: Yes, that's right. It's awfully complex and in an organization
as you move along, a lot of it's pure chance. One doesn't take
his or her career and design it and then proceed. He may have
some goals but, gee, there's an awful lot of chance! It walks
you around from here to there as you move along. But that's
life; that's what makes it exciting. I'm sure this happened too.

At any rate, this is the way the Forest Service does business
today and it's really not labeled; it's understood. I suppose
as time goes on, there will be further evolutionary changes as
society changes. But it's made the Forest Service very adaptable
over the years. The Forest Service has adapted quickly to the
norms of society and the society that it serves. That's been the
strength of the Forest Service.

105

Lage: Do you think this helped in dealing with all the increased level
of public involvement?

Torheim: Very much, and that's how the Forest Service actually became a
leader in government in public involvement in a field that was
never touched.

Lage: Some of the same skills —

Torheim: The same skills, yes; the ability to deal in conflict situations,
the ability to understand the group process and the communication
process, and the ability to actually create synergism to get the
best answers. That's all a spin-off from the adoption of
behavioral science techniques. This is most unusual to me because
foresters, engineers, and biologists of various kinds, which really
make up the bulk of the Forest Service work force, had zero
education, most of us, in these fields. So, many of us were boning
up. I read psychology books. I attended classes, seminars. All
of us did for these kinds of subjects that we never got in school.

Lage: Has any of this filtered down to the professional schools so
that they do train- -

Torheim: Oh, sure, sure. Still not so much, but then the Forest Service
picks this up by continuing these as inhouse training programs.
It was pretty exciting to get into these fields because I used
to consider these as rather theoretical ivory tower sorts of
activities and probably would have, too, if I had taken it on
campus. But if you can apply it to your real job and see
immediately whether it works or doesn't, that does make it pretty

106

Torheim: exciting and makes it useful. So this is what took place and
then, of course, getting into the conflicts that emanated from
special interest groups having different views about how the
public lands should be classified and all, there was work to
do with these new techniques. I guess that's about my view of
it anyway .

Cliff and McGuire: _Managerial J3tyles_Illustrated##

Lage: You had something you wanted to add on differences in style.

Torheim: Just a little personalized input to illustrate changes in

management style we were talking about. Ed [Edward P.] Cliff
was chief of the Forest Service [1962-1972] had come up through
the organization in the traditional way we had spoken about. He
was a very capable forest supervisor in southern Oregon. He came
up through experiences with a heavy fire forest, lots of
management problems in the thirties with arson and everything else
in this forest. He was a good manager. He worked his way up as
regional forester and through the ranks and eventually to chief
in the characteristic way.

[He was] well-liked by everybody. We knew exactly where
Ed. stood, the typical espouser of scientific management principles.
When I was in the Washington office I used to on occasion attend
chief and staff meetings in Ed Cliff's office. Ed had a rectangular
table, and each of the deputy chiefs had their chairs around this
rectangular table. Then Ed managed the meeting. They always sat

107

Torheim: in the same chairs. The associate deputy chiefs had chairs away
from the table and generally kind of behind their deputies. Then
those of us in staff roles would come in to make certain inputs
on certain items of the agenda. We sat in kind of a peanut
gallery off to one side. Now, this wasn't a big room. It was a
rather small room. But it was very structured. The interaction
then was also quite formal. I don't mean stuffy, but rules were
certainly well understood if not written down [chuckles] on how
one communicated. It worked quite well.

There was a real shift when John McGuire succeeded Ed Cliff
[1972], and this was noticeable to all.

Lage: Were you in Washington?

Torheim: No, I was in the field then. I was deputy regional forester in
Region 6, but we go back frequently to Washington and deal with
the chief. John McGuire was one of the early people in the
behavioral science input to management. He was director of the
southwestern experiment station at Berkeley. He was quite an
espouser of new principles of management. He had come out of
research and so he was a little closer to the field later in
his career. His personal style was different, too. But it was
quite noticeable what John did differently then about these chief
and staff meetings. He didn't use a rectangular table. It was
gone. He had a very large circular table in the middle of his
room, and he and his deputies sat around the circular table, so
they were interacting eyeball to eyeball. It was a low coffee-
type table.

108

Torheim: Then the others, the associate deputies and those of us who had
come in to make inputs, we just sat casually around where we
wanted to pick a chair. John then stimulated conflict and
conversation. In fact, one of his techniques was if they weren't
getting enough input on the problem to be solved he would be a
devil's advocate or he would say something that was certainly
challengeable and stimulating. That's the research approach, by
the way.

So it's an interesting difference in styles even to the very
furniture in the chief's office. [laughter]

Lage: Were you quite aware he was only playing the devil's advocate,
or you weren't quite sure?

Torheim: Oh, yes, quite sure. He always used that technique very openly —
no games .

Lage: He came out of the research branch?

Torheim: Yes, most of his career was in research.

Lage: Was that unusual?

Torheim: No, Ed Cliff's predecessor, Dick McArdle was also out of research.
Chiefs have come both from administration and research. Well, I
thought that was just a little story illustrative really of a
small part of management activity, but it expresses not only a
little difference in personnel but a little difference in managerial
style to be more at harmony with the way the outfit was moving.

109

V THE FOREST SERVICE ORGANIZATION: CHANGES AND CHALLENGES

Reorganization in the Seventies////

Lage: Should we move to more discussion of the reorganization in the
Forest Service?

Torheim: Yes, let's do that. I'll probably have a little trouble with

dates and all, but I can get into the general area. The Forest
Service had, as we talked about earlier, the line/staff type of
organization with the assistant forest supervisors and assistant
regional foresters having line direction in their activities. We
talked about that quite a little bit. Now then, as we moved along
with getting more and more different kinds of people in the
organization, beginning to introduce behavioral science principles
into management, the drifting away of scientific management and
more authoritarian type of management, and learned more about the
participative approach to getting the job done better through team
action, it soon became obvious that the line/staff organization
wasn't working all that well.

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Torheim: Land management planning had an influence on it, too. There was
a lot of what we called functionalism. Functionalism (and it's
not a very good word, but for lack of a better one I'll use it)
meant that we dealt with a bag full of functional activities with
strong, directive staff members pushing their activity at the
expense (now, this is a bit of a caricature), but at the expense
of the other activity. The supervisor had a lot of trouble
sorting out all of this direction he was getting from assistant
regional foresters who were pushing their own program, and
likewise the ranger was having trouble sorting out priorities
among all the direction he was getting from the various forest
staff members, and playing the budget and fund allocation game
at the same time.

This wasn't working well, as the job became more complex —
land management planning, trade-offs, increased work force,
and that sort of thing — and our increased awareness about what
was happening to us. So it looked like maybe a different kind
of organization was needed. Also, at the same time, with the
tremendous increase in work load brought about by new legislation
and more public interest in national forests, the ranger couldn't
keep track of everything in a big district anymore personally.
The forest supervisor couldn't run every ranger district like he
used to either. He couldn't keep track of all this stuff. All
the public job — public involvement and contacts with the public —
this is all part of the things that were happening in the sixties.

Ill

Torheim: The generic term for the managerial grid system and the introduction
of behavioral science was called organization development. This
was the generic term for all of this activity we talked about
earlier. The objective there was to improve your organization
along the lines that you thought needed improving .

Lage: Was there a particular individual who was connected with pushing
this?

Torheim: No, this was pushed from all directions, and that's what's

interesting about it. It's kind of like I described the move
for multiple-use planning to land management planning. There was
a general overall feeling of dissatisfaction. No individual
pushed it at all. It was at the field by the way, at the field
level.

Field Experimentation for Structural Change

Torheim: Again, experimentation seemed to be the way to make this change,
if necessary, work out. Some forests were selected by the chief
and the regional foresters to do experimentation. One of them
was the Eldorado National Forest in California, and there were
some others too. But they began to experiment with organization
change, a little different type of staff alignment, more deputy
supervisors and that sort of thing.

Again, [with] the intense interest and competition and need,
other regions wanted to get in on it too. So here we go again! —
which is healthy. In every region there is always a forest, a

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Torheim: change- agent forest, somebody willing to try. So it turned out
that several regions, with or without blessings from the
Washington office, began to do some organizational experimentation —
not going outside of the directives from the chief, but really
teetering on the edge.

After a while, the chief acquiesced (let me put it that way)
because a lot of people had already started organization change
without the blessing of the chief, so the chief said, "Okay,
let's try this." We found several regions trying organization
change, but it wasn't well-directed, kind of like the land
management planning, and it got out of hand. But I think in
retrospect it was useful because it caused a lot of experimentation
to take place.

Lage: Where were you as an observer? How were you involved in this?

Torheim: I was deputy regional forester in Region 6. We had some forests
in Region 6, and I guess every region did, that were trying
different ways of organizing. With the informal communication
systems between regions and forests, these supervisors would talk
to each other, and they'd get new ideas. I don't mean anything
dramatic was happening, but we were trying to learn how to change
and cope with all of these ways of doing business. Usually on
the forest level, it was decided to consolidate the various
resource activities so the forest supervisor wouldn't have so
many subordinates. In some of these big forests, the supervisor
would have thirteen staff people and six rangers all reporting
to the forest supervisor. So that was where the problems were
in the larger forests.

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Torheim: The upshot of this was that this [experimentation] couldn't go on,
so the chief grabbed hold of the thing and kind of stopped the
action of experimentation and based on the experimentation, laid
out some organizational structures for forests that would be okay.
They could work within these various organization patterns. Then
eventually this was done for the regions as well. They were done
together. This happened about 1972.

Multiple Deputies and Line/Staff Adjustments

Lage: What was the actual outcome?

Torheim: The basic change was, in most cases — well, all of the regions
were organized the same. (Let's start with the region.) I'll
talk about the western regions because the eastern regions have
a little different responsibilities for state and private
forestry. But the western regions typically had a regional forester
and a deputy regional forester. The regional forester and deputy
occupied the top management slot as a unit, the typical alter-ego
deputy type.

Then there were assistant regional foresters for each of
these activities that we've talked about, not just in resources
but also in business management and state and private forestry.
Now, that was quite a span of control when you think of all of
those staff people reporting to the regional forester and deputy,
plus all of the forest supervisors. There can be as many as
thirty or forty people. The new structure consolidated the assistant

114

Torheim: regional foresters into groups under multiple deputies. So the
job that I had as deputy for Region 6 was changed to deputy
for resources, which meant I was responsible for all of the
resource management activity, but not for state and private
forestry anymore and not for business management. There were
two other deputies that handled that, one state and private and
one in administration. This was the same organization for all
of the western regions.

Lage: Then the staff people would report to you?

Torheim: Yes, the staff people reported to me. Now, at the same time

the role of the staff, or the assistant regional foresters, was
changed. They were no longer assistant regional foresters. They
were called directors of timber management, directors of fire,
directors of wildlife* and so forth. The line/staff was eliminated;
they were staff. So they could not direct a [forest] supervisor.
The deputy's job was to coordinate this activity, so that policy
and personnel selection and budget formulation was done through
the deputy, from the forest supervisor through the deputy. Of
course, the interaction takes place, but the responsibility [lay
with the deputy] , and conflict was resolved that way.

Now, the forests were organized a little similarly, but
forests differ in size and mission and geographical location. In
essence the roles of the staff people on the forests (the assistant
forest supervisors) were changed also. That was a profound change.

Lage: You mentioned yesterday that these staff people had had personnel
powers — the selection of personnel.

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Torheim: Yes .

Lage: How did that work?

Torheim: Say a region was going to select a forest staff person or a

forest supervisor within the authority of the regional forester.
Typically, this would be done with a selection committee made
up of the regional forester and all of the assistant regional
foresters in the staff organization with input from personnel,
maybe some input from the forest supervisor and maybe not, it
depends on how that particular region was managed.

If the selection was to be, say, for a forest staff person
in range management, the assistant regional forester for range
management really had the most say about that and very frequently
it was his recommendation that prevailed. Sometimes that was not
acceptable to the forest supervisor, but he had to take it anyway.

Also, the review of promotion rosters and the general
personnel activity was done that way, again with the assistant
regional forester in charge of the activity, having the dominant
say about the people who were moving along in the field in his
activity. Again, frequently there would be conflict — not always,
but sometimes.

With the new role of directors then, they didn't have this
kind of clout so to speak. They would advise the regional forester
about who they thought ought to be selected, but then there would
be a smaller group probably just a few of the assistant regional
foresters. It depended on the system that was used, but it would
be a smaller group, and he would just recommend. He wouldn't veto.

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Torheim: Before the reorganization, the assistant regional forester had an
out-and-out veto — maybe not formally written down — but by golly,
if he didn't approve, the regional forester absolutely wouldn't
go along with the choice.

There was more debate and then in many cases the supervisor
had something to say about it. He could make an input. Sometimes
he was overruled, but at least he was part and parcel to the
decision-making process, instead of wondering who they were going
to send him. So this changed it.

That had really been a job-satisfying activity for the
assistant regional foresters, that many of them felt they had
lost. There was a sense that they should watch the people coming
along in their activity and keep close track of them, and they
had lots to say about the future of the technical expertise in
the outfit, particularly in the staff roles. Then in selecting
line people like supervisors they had a lot to say too. Sometimes
if an assistant regional forester didn't think that a person was
suitable they weren't selected. The regional forester paid close
attention to his staff in these matters, again often to the
dissatisfaction of the supervisor. This was shifted around.

Reaction to Changed Staff Responsibilities

Torheim: Again, many of the now-called "directors" thought that the supervisors
had just rejected them, that it was just a matter now between the
regional forester and the supervisors and they were just clear out.

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Torheim: They weren't even asked anymore. Now, this is a caricature
again, but some of them felt pretty strongly that way.

Lage: You must have seen this at close hand from your job.

Torheim: I was very much involved with this, yes. I was an arbiter lots

of time between the staff person — the director — and the supervisor.
Again this was an individual thing. Lots of people were, in fact,
quite comfortable with this change.

The other power loss (job satisfaction) that many directors
felt was the inability to influence fund allocation. Some felt
very strongly that the funds should go to those supervisors who,
in the judgment of the director, were making the best use of those
funds. After the reorganization, of course, it was more
formalized. All the directors did was to recommend, and then the
deputy would make the decision. Then we moved over toward a
more management by objectives kind of thing.

A number of directors at all levels — and this was true at
the forest level among the staff people, the Washington office
level, and the regions, it was an individual thing — felt that
their job was much diluted. I noticed, however, that this wasn't
universally true. Some of the former assistant regional foresters
moved over to the director role or changed their way of operating
quite easily and comfortably.

Lage: Did some move up to the deputy role as well?

Torheim: Yes, oh sure, but there aren't too many of those jobs. But what I
think I noticed mostly was that people coming into the director's
jobs for the first time, with their role established before they

118

Torheim: got the job, had no trouble at all with it. So over time this
was taken care of.

What interested me was that we were very much aware of this,
because we had a greater sensitivity of how to work together, we
actually critiqued this problem, talked about it. It was there.
In years past, that would have been kind of underground. You
wouldn't have talked about that kind of a personal thing. No,
we put it up on top of the table and dealt with it.

Lage: With the individuals involved?

Torheim: Oh sure, you bet. We talked about it, how we were going to

overcome this. So that was kind of a healthy way of dealing with
it.

Lage: Was it effective in bringing planning in a more unified —

Torheim: Yes, I think you'd be honest to say though that there are still
some who would say, "No, it didn't do anything." That's an
individual judgment. My own judgment is that after the trauma of
change was overcome, it works well now. But some other things
have happened. Some of the supervisors finally realized that they
had indeed pulled away from the staff — "Gee, this is great; my
shackles are gone" — and they quit communicating with staff directors.
What they discovered was that the quality of work on the ground
that the director and his staff can help them achieve was missing.
Then they began to have a self-awareness that if they didn't
really open up the lines of communication between their staff and
the expert staff in the regional office, they were going to [lose]
quality thereby. So they got back together so to speak!

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Lage: The staff person for timber management in the regional office

didn't have a line at all to the staff person for timber management
in the supervisor's office. That wasn't a direct line either.

Torheim: Yes, it was; informally, a very direct line. You bet. In the

old system that was a directive line as well. In the new system
that's a consultative line and a quality control line. But you
see why the supervisor and ranger sometimes felt that the staff
was really running the show because he had direct staff
communication from Washington to the regional office to the
forest, and the ranger was directed to perform. The regional
forester and the forest supervisor never got involved. Now, that
would be a worst case example, but it could happen.

But any organization structure change by itself isn't good
enough unless the people make it work. There's the old cliche
that a good bunch of people can make any organization structure
function. I think that's still true. But what interests me is
that this change was brought about through field dissatisfaction
and a felt need by the field. It wasn't imposed by the Washington
office. In fact, the Washington came along somewhat reluctantly
I would say after the fact. But that's okay. I think effective
change is made only that way.

Lage: The sense I get is that the dissatisfaction on the field level

was related to the change in their missions, the new needs.

Torheim: The new need. Not so much mission change, but the greater

complexities of managing the national forests — public awareness,

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Torheim: new legislation, a different mix of people instead of just

foresters, Job Corps — they were all together.
Lage: It's such a complicated —
Torheim: Complicated; yes, very complex.

From Inspections to Management Reviews

Lage: We haven' t talked about the inspection system and the way that
that changed. Is this a good place to go into it?

Torheim: Yes, it would be involved. The inspection system in the Forest
Service was a very useful tool in management and really has kept
the outfit together getting the job done rather uniformly and
well I think, between regions and from top to bottom. That was
developed, of course, out of the scientific management principles
of the twenties, the militaristic background of management and
some of the good things that come out of that kind of management
activity. The Forest Service used the inspection system for more
than just quality and quantity control as we mentioned earlier.

It was also used for training.
If

Torheim: The inspection system was quite structured. Generally it was made

up of several kinds, but the principal kinds of inspections were
first of all functional inspections. These were inspections carried
out in a functional activity like wildlife management or watershed
management or fire or timber. [It was] conducted by the staff
person at all levels, by the way. The Washington office inspected

121

Torheim: the region, the region inspected the forest, and the forest the
ranger district. So functional inspections were carried out on
a regular programmatic basis periodically over time. That's the
way the Forest Service really maintained quality control and
perpetuated training because there was lots to be learned this
way.

Lage: Was this a tense event for the ranger?

Torheim: Let me talk about styles again. I'll describe the types of

inspection, and then I'll tell you how they were really carried
out. Within the functional there was also a limited functional.
Take fire management. A general function will be all of the
activities in fire. A limited functional might be a slash burning
activity (a piece of the fire activity) .

Then there were the G.I.I.'s (general integrating inspections)
at all levels, which looked periodically at the whole management
picture — all activities together. Then there were special audits
required often by law — personnel audits and fiscal audits
principally. So this was all part of the inspection system.

With all the background that we talked about earlier, that
inspection system didn't work well within the context of the new
organization, the new way of managing the Forest Service and
the moving away from functionalism with all of its board fence
syndrome to a more team-oriented way and integrative way of
managing. This time again, there was experimentation at the field
level in various ways of changing inspections. Certain regions

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Torheim: like Region 1 were selected formally by the chief, in this

instance, to try out some new ways of inspecting. The upshot is
that out of this experimentation and a really felt need again,
the inspection system was changed to put together management
reviews mostly based not just on periodic scheduling but on
perceived need. Also it was a participative type. Really the
change was made more in how it's done rather than what was done.

Let me describe the way that the other inspections were
carried out. With the old type of inspection carried out from
one level of the hierarchy down one notch, naturally you'd find
the problems of gamesmanship and some of the negative things,
along with all of the positive things that occurred. Now, I want
to say right at the outset that I always thought personally the
inspection system had many more positive things than negative.
But the problems that would come about would be the usual problems
of trying to show your best face and not really laying out your
problems much. Problems should be discovered by the inspector —
this was the inspectee's point of view, if you want to carry it
to the utmost.

If you generated problems or demonstrated problems to the
inspector sometimes really you didn't get much help. All you got
was a poor report, and then you had trouble crawling out of the
hole. Now, compare that with the present type. The present
type of inspection is a problem-generating activity by the
inspecting group and the inspectee who work together as a team,
and it's problem-solution.

123

Lage: So the ranger wouldn't feel threatened to bring up the fact that

he had a problem.

Torheim: No, there's no threat. Right, that's the whole objective. So
there's a complete change in how that's done.

Lage: Now, it really happens that way? The ranger is not looked at

critically because he hasn't been able to solve his particular
problem.

Torheim: No. Besides, it's no surprise. If a supervisor and the regional
people are doing their job, they know currently how a performance
is taking place anyway through informal visits and the usual
interaction, so there aren't any surprises. Usually there are truly
management problems that need solving, and they're laid out. The
old system was based more on discovery. Now, again that's a
generalization that wasn't always carried out that way by individuals.
Certain individuals didn't believe in that and had a personality
and a way of looking at the world around them that permitted them
to actually do problem solving even under the old system. We had
certain people who were candid and above board that could make
even the old system work well. But generally it didn't fit the
new way of managing. In my judgment, the new system (the
management reviews and the program reviews) are working quite well.

Now, keep in mind that also under the old system, the
assistant regional forester and staff people generally were
directive. Remember, they had line direction, so there was a
high level of threat there to one's career. There still is a

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Torheim: threat if you don't perform, but it's based really on that

performance and not on discovery and game playing that might
take place.

A Growing Openness in the Organization

Lage: Now, the other thing that occurs to me (and this may be wrong) ,

as you describe the new plan, you're describing it from the
point of view of a higher-up, whereas you were down in the bottom
of the barrel during the older system. Do you think that you're
in touch enough with how a ranger perceives it now — ?

Torheim: No, I'm not naive enough to believe that. One of the prices you
pay as you move up in the hierarchy is that you don't really get
all of the bad news from below. You have to really understand
that or you can't function. So I'm sure there must be all kinds
of problems that people are solving today, too. There always will
be and that will cause further change in the future. It's only
natural that if you have something to do with instituting and
installing new ways of doing business you have a lot of ownership
and you feel good and positive about it, and you're sure it must
be working beautifully at all levels. But it's probably not!
[laughs] So I don't deny that.

Lage: On the other hand, if it's not as authoritarian an organization,

you probably know more about what's going on.

Torheim: I think so, and we've had enough external feedback, I think, to
reinforce that. One of the things that you get from almost any
consultant that comes into the outfit or, even the public, is the

125

Torheim: openness of the Forest Service, the willingness to lay things out
in the open, the nonthreatening atmosphere and kind of a general
aura of constructive candor that seems to be an inherent
characteristic of the outfit. So I think people feed back better
than they used to.

Also, the young people in the outfit aren't inhibited.
They're not overwhelmed by organization. I was kind of overwhelmed
by just the organization itself when I came in — the expertise of
everybody, and where I sat, and that sort of thing. The young
people I've met with today, they just lay it out. My children
do that, too. So there's a different social conscience and social
behavior in the nation that the organization has too.

Lage: Less fear of authority maybe.

Torheim: I think so and just a general more openness. I think so. «

The Forest Service on the Defense: Public jCnvolvement

Lage: Some of the reading that I've done sort of contradicts a couple

of things you've said. In reading about public involvement, for
instance, a couple of the studies that were made mentioned that
the Forest Service was terribly defensive in dealing with the
public and very threatened. Now, this of course was back say
in the earlier part of the seventies.

Torheim: That's true. We had a real tough time in the organization to
really get aware that the good things that we thought we were
doing in managing the national forests really weren't thought to

126

Torheim: be so good. We felt sincerely that they were. Besides, as I

mentioned earlier, the Forest Service always was getting pretty
good feedback — but it was pretty small feedback, as we talked
about yesterday — and not really much feedback by people who
didn't agreed with the way we managed; mostly by people who
agreed. So it was kind of a shock to us in the outfit, who were
convinced that we were doing a good job, to hear from so many
people all of a sudden, practically, that all was not that well.
So, yes , we got defensive. Then we sought to find a way to
prove to the public that things were okay. But I think the turning
point was when we got into a massive public involvement effort
nationwide for the first time, or western regionwide, in the so-
called RARE I, The Roadless Area Review and Evaluation, for the
first time, trying to segregate out wilderness for the future.

That was the most massive attempt at public involvement
that any government agency or private agency as far as I know had
ever engaged in. We were pure amateurs at it. But we had a
dedicated purpose to really make it work. That changed everything
in my judgment. Then we really got feedback — honest feedback —
from a broad spectrum of the public. Because of the new ways
of managing, we didn't find conflict so threatening. Now, many
individuals did for a while, but it became more —

Lage: You get de-sensitized to that kind of thing.

Torheim: Well, it didn't seem so personally threatening because you could
work on the issues, and we used to take it personally because
when you work with forests or live in the forest, you have a lot

127

Torheim: of ownership as to how that land is managed and you feel that if
people are criticizing land management, they're criticizing you
personally. We got over that and got to working with things —
of course you can't get away from people. You still have personal
responsibility for your actions but at least you could get down
to dealing with conflict on a land allocation issue for the merits
of the case by various interest groups. So, yes, this was a
tough change but I think the Forest Service accomplished it. It
took several years.

Lage: But there is still a lot of attacks, and you still are in a
defensive posture.

Involving the Public in Management Decisions

•
Torheim: I think there always will be. I think that's healthy. It's the

way society is put together. I know this is an oral history, but
if you want to look ahead a little bit, here's my judgment of
where we're headed just briefly, and I think it's the way we ought
to go.

As I mentioned earlier, the public generally was not
interested for many years directly in what we were doing in
managing national forests. Then they became terribly interested
particularly in the land allocation issue and resource allocation
issue. This is continuing today, but I see that the land allocation
issue through legislation and land management planning is going to
be dealt with pretty soon. What I see then on the horizon is

128

Torheim: that the public interest groups will begin to be watching how
the national forests are managed — are they being managed to a
quality standard and are they being managed within the confines
of the law and the land management plans and the resource plans.
So I think we will see a transition, I think a very healthy one,
for the ranger having segments of the public watching how he does
his business everyday.

Lage: Do you mean how he cuts his timber?

Torheim: You bet — some of the nitty gritty.

Lage: You don't find that threatening?

Torheim: Oh, no. I think that's healthy. In fact, we were preparing our
people for that in Region 1 just before I retired. We were
actually preparing for that. It won't happen all of a sudden, but
we see some evidence of that already. Why not get ready for it?
So we found rangers inviting more and more people and interest
groups right out to the woods to see what we're doing here.

Lage: When you invite them up there is it kind of a "show me" effort?

Torheim: It used to be, it used to be. Now, we invite criticism. It used
to be. Gosh, it used to be a "show me" trip and you put your
best foot forward, and you showed all of the good things you did
and put up signs and the whole works. No, no. [laughs] No more!
And I think that's great. That's the way it should be.

Lage: So maybe you're involving them a little more in some of the

problems that you have as well.

129

Torheim: Sure, that's what public involvement is all about. It should be
an integral facet of the management activity — the way you do
business — and beyond the land management planning, eventually,
as I think anyway, into the actual techniques of management.

Lage: That's a long way from considering the forester as the expert.

Torheim: Right.

Lage: Do you think the public is becoming more expert in the field?
Is that one reason that you are able to —

Torheim: Those who are interested enough to do it, certainly are, I should
say. Take a look at forestry courses and classes on the campuses
today. It used to be that only forestry majors were in forestry
classes, and they were darn small classes, many of them. Now
forestry classes are huge classes on many campuses because there
are lots of nonmajors taking forestry electives or taking minors
in forestry. There are also people taking forestry who never
intend to practice forestry, just like people who take law but
never become lawyers or whatever. When I say "forestry" I mean
in the broadest sense.

Other resource courses too — wildlife biology, soil science.
There are not just professionals in these courses anymore. So
that, plus the general interest of lots of people, plus the
organized groups that make it their business to kind of watch how
the public lands are managed.

Lage: How do you feel after one of these plans has been developed in

such an intricate fashion with all of the public involvement and
then it's set aside by a court decision?

130

Torheim: Oh, I feel very neutral about that and wish we could have done
better. I used to feel defeated and [that it was a] disaster.
No more! That's part of the process. Now, I don't mean to say
that one gets cynical about it because you do feel disappointed.
But what you do is go back and find out where it went haywire
and do it again. That's been done many times.

Lage: It sounds as if at least you personally are able to really step

back and take a more objective view.

Torheim: Yes, and I think our managers are. The people who hurt on those
kinds of things are the technicians who really put their soul
and body into that. The managers today in the Forest Service, if
he or she can't take that, they can't be managers. They have to
regroup their forces. But it's easy to see where the technicians
who put all of their, professionalism and technology into those
plans really feel put down. Particularly the pesticide issue,
where they know through scientific evidence that 2, 4-D is
absolutely not toxic. The professional can show you the scientific
literature for thirty years on this. What they don't realize is
that it's not a scientific question. It's a political question.
That's tough for the technologist and scientist. It's really
tough. But if the manager doesn't believe it's a political issue
and deal with it politically, I mean with a small "p," as well as
a large "p," then he'll miss the boat. He won't get the job done.
So that's what it's all about. I guess we're philosophizing a
little here! [laughs]

131

Political Responsibilities of Field Administrators

Lage: We talked just briefly yesterday about the political responsi
bilities of field administrators, and we were going to discuss
that further. What were you talking about?

Torheim: Let's take it in an historical perspective again. First off,
I want to say again that there has been, historically, marked
differences between regions. So I'm going to speak really for
the western regions and my own experience, particularly Region 6
and Region 1. The job of dealing with members of Congress in
particular (the senators and the representatives) , at least in
my experience in the western regions, was handled for many years
quite closely by the regional forester and his immediate staff and
by maybe a selected supervisor now and then, but again closely
directed by the regional forester. Now, the reason for this was
that it was thought that the supervisors and rangers had little
opportunity to get very sophisticated in dealing with members
of Congress and might really step across the boundary of the
separation of powers or would get into a political hassle and put
themselves in jeopardy as professionals when they really are
carrying out the mandates of Congress. So the general feeling
in the field then was that we should not be political, so to
speak, and we shouldn't really have any oral communication.
Now, that doesn't mean that when congressmen come out to the
district that you don't show them around, but they were usually
escorted by the regional forester or by the forest supervisor.

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Torheim: So I would say that the communication in the field with members
of Congress was extremely limited. In the seventies, with the
proliferation of new laws and with the increased public interest
in the national forest and all of the conflicts and special
interest groups, congressmen began to get (in the West anyway)
terrifically sensitized by national forest issues. In fact,
they became campaign issues very often. In Region 6 this meant
that the regional forester even hung on more tightly to that.
Charlie Connaughton, who was regional forester, and Herb Stone
before him, both espoused this philosophy — not to put the field
folks in jeopardy.

The level of activity became so great, finally, and the
members of Congress themselves began to communicate informally
with forest supervisors that this became very hard to manage.

Lage: Would the members of Congress be trying to affect policy on the
forest?

Torheim: No, not really. No, they don't do that. But you can fall into a

trap. I'll give you some examples as we go along, particularly on
when you have interest groups that have different opinions and
the congressmen were trying to sort them out.

Charlie retired in 1971 and Rex Resler became regional
forester and I became deputy, as we talked about earlier. Then
we began to think — and, of course, this had been developing while
Charlie was regional forester, too — that we really ought to find

•

a way for our supervisors to communicate with the members of

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Torheim: Congress. For instance, all the congressional constituent mail
used to have to come right to the regional office and be signed
off here — every one of them. I was doing a lot of this.

Lage: Any mail to a congressman they would send straight on over to

the Forest Service?

Torheim: Yes, indeed. You bet. A congressman would write to a forest

supervisor sometimes (or staff) asking about this problem — this
constituent was unhappy or wanted information. That supervisor
would send a copy of that letter right away to the regional
office. He would write a draft reply, and it would come to the
regional office for my or the regional forester's signature, and
then go back to the member of Congress. We kept tight control, and
that was to be sure things were done properly.

We were having trouble being responsive. The communication
time began to lengthen because there was such a volume of this
activity. All these things were happening gradually. So Rex and
myself and the supervisors and the assistant regional foresters
put on our thinking caps about how we might want to change this.
We decided we ought to really find some way for the forest
supervisors to respond directly. So we opened the manual a crack
and permitted the supervisors to respond to some things but not
to others. Then we let them get a little experience, and we had
some training sessions in congressional relations and all. Anyway,
finally over time, that's opened up now so that there's free
communication between forest supervisors (not so often rangers)

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Torheim: and members of Congress and their staffs. It's quite normal

and it's not controlled. The timing is controlled, but at least
the communications can be made directly now formally between the
forest supervisor and members of Congress.

Lage: But you don't find the congressman — I would think they would have

a tendency, if there's a lot of constituent dissatisfaction, to
try to influence your policy directly.

Torheim: Oh, of course, and they do. That's always been the case because
if you get a letter from a congressman about a problem, you're
sure as heck going to find out what it's about. Many constituents
use the congressman for leverage. That's okay. That's just
another input. Now, that's on things . It's "this special use
permit" or "this road" or "this timber sale" or "my contract,"
that sort of thing. Those are pretty straight forward.

Forest Service Input on Legislative Policy

Torheim: The other increased level of activity in the political arena,
though, has occurred in the policy formulation in legislative
business, and that's a little more tricky. We didn't get involved
in that at all much until recent years. That was closely held by
the Washington office and, of course, still is. There are some
definite routes to travel because in legislation in particular,
the Forest Service being part of the executive branch then
testifies for the president on positions. So you can't take
positions in the field. Everybody understands that. But it's

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Torheim: awfully easy to get in a bind if you're not careful. This has
happened most recently with all of the wilderness legislation
because there is so much of it and because the expertise really
is at the forest level, that the forest supervisors now are
frequently called upon to testify at hearings , to give technical
information. They had to be careful that they keep it to
technical and not to positions. Members of Congress are very
sensitive to this too.

The real bind though is when the member of Congress gets
in trouble with constituents when he tries to sort out some
middle ground between polarized positions on wilderness, for
example. Here's an example. The Alpine Lakes wilderness legislation
in the state of Washington on the Snoqualmie and Wenatchee forests
was in the hopper while I was deputy regional forester in Region 6.
The member of Congress in whose district this was mostly located
was Representative Lloyd Meads from Everett, Washington. Lloyd
was putting a piece of legislation through the house, and there
was a companion bill in the Senate that Senator [Henry] Jackson
was sponsoring, to create an Alpine Lakes wilderness.

The Forest Service had a plan — this is a very typical case —
the Forest Service had done its study and had a plan. The timber
industry and other commodity users had put together a coalition
and working group. They came up with a plan for an Alpine Lakes
wilderness that was quite a bit smaller than the Forest Service
plan. The Federation of Western Outdoor Clubs and the Sierra Club

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Torheim: and others put together a similar working group and they came up
with a wilderness proposal much larger than the Forest Service.
This is very typical. This has been repeated in many pieces of
wilderness legislation. Nobody disagreed that some of the Alpine
Lakes area should be wilderness. This is north of Mount Rainier,
very beautiful country. The question is how large should it be?

The congressman then had really three positions he could
take to produce a bill. Naturally, he was trying to seek the
compromise position. Without getting into all of the details,
frequently the Forest Service study is typically somewhere in
between, so that generally they use the Forest Service study and
then build their legislation out of that; then through public
hearings [they] will modify it. It never gets to be as large as
the wilderness interest group wants, nor does it ever become as
small as the commodity interests want typically.

The problem is though that the congressman or senator latches
onto the Forest Service study, and this becomes the basis for a
bill. A lot of the public interest groups and the members of
them attack the Forest Service then because that's the one
that he selected. Well, everybody knows that it's not necessarily
going to come out that way, but that's a convenient one for him
to select because it's typically in the middle. So then the lobbying
goes on and the forest supervisor is attacked in editorials — not
always attacked — but it's espoused to be the Forest Service position.
It really isn't at that point because the Forest Service hasn't
been called upon to testify yet.

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Torheim: But anyway, there's an awful lot of lobbying going on at this
stage of the game. The forest supervisor gets accused of
generating wrong information — "his study information data is no
good" — by both parties. So it puts you in a bind, a national
public bind, that in the past our supervisors never experienced
at all. So they've got to handle this quite astutely, and I must
say that most of the time they do. But they have to really know
and learn about the legislative process and the political process.

So now our supervisors are very sophisticated in this area.
We have training sessions for all of our forest supervisors
nationwide in Washington where they actually visit committees
of Congress and get accustomed to them. Many of them have visited
congressmen annually to keep them updated on what's going on. I
think they do a marvelous job. Now, this interestingly enough is
not new to the supervisors in the East and the South. They've been

doing this for years.
ft

Torheim: In the West the national forests were created out of the public
domain and in any given state there are a number of national
forests. In the South and the East, the national forests were
created under the Weeks law through purchase of private land
(much of it went back to counties for taxes) and other purchases
and donations. So for example, the southern region, with head
quarters in Atlanta, extends all the way from Texas to Virginia.
The eastern region, with headquarters in Milwaukee, extends all
the way from Maine to Minnesota and West Virginia.

138

Torheim: So supervisors really have to represent the regional forester
in their states. The regional forester couldn't take care of
that many members of Congress. So they characteristically dealt
on a state basis as an arm of the regional forester with the
members of Congress. Now, of course, the issues there over these
years were mostly local issues pertaining to that national forest.
In the West, because of the wilderness issue and the need to
allocate these lands, they were national problems on the western
national forests. So that's why everything was held so closely
until finally the volume of activity got so big, the forest
supervisor had to be expert in dealing with it. So that's the
reason.

Lage: As you describe that process, how the Forest Service became

involved and is n<Sw involved in the political process, it sounds
as if the Forest Service takes a very passive role — they're drawn
into it, and then they have a need to be able to testify. Is that
always the case or does the supervisor ever try to promote his
plan through the political process?

Torheim: No, no, he certainly doesn't do that. You have to really make

that distinction because that can turn on you. That's not the role
of the supervisor. The role of the supervisor is to keep the
member of Congress informed and to make technical input in a formal
way. The Washington office takes on the chore at committee
hearings in Washington to represent the administration, but
frequently the supervisor will go back and assist from a technical

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Torheim: point of view. But he really has to be sure that he stays in that
role.

Now, this sometimes is difficult, and that's the dilemma,
because in high spirited debate, one interest group or another
will accuse the forest supervisor of lobbying for his position.
That may not be true, but they try and make a case that way. The
supervisor really has to establish a record of not having done
that. There's been many times in the heat of debate with polarized
groups who feel very strongly about their position, and the member
of Congress trying to sort this out and satisfy both sides, [that]
the heat really becomes more intense than the light. It takes
a very astute forest supervisor not to get defensive about his
study plan and start lobbying for that.

Lage: I would think that would be hard to do.

Torheim: Yes, he really has to know the political process. He has to know
his role, and he has to stay with it. Sometimes that doesn't work
out so good. They slip a little bit in the heat of the battle,
and we have to pull back. But that's a new role for the western
supervisor, and a very high risk role, that our folks as managers
had never learned and had to learn through doing. Now we have
training programs, hopefully before they become supervisors or
soon after, to become acquainted with it.

Lage: The supervisor's job sounds a lot more difficult than it used to be.

Torheim: It really is. Oh, I should say so.

140

Computers; A Management Tool, a Tool, to Manage

Lage: We wanted to get into the question of computers and I thought you
had a very interesting way of describing computers — "a management
tool, a tool to manage." What brought that characterization to
mind?

Torheim: It's just my perception, I guess. But it's an interesting story
and, as I've come to learn over time, not really peculiar to the
Forest Service. But here's the way it happened with the Forest
Service. A computer was used by the Forest Service pretty early
in the game when it became part of getting the job done as an
accounting tool, like a big calculator. Most regions had computers
not too long after World War II, but again they were used for
payroll, engineering, road design, and mathematical types of things.
So they were really run by the technicians and they were budgeted
for getting technical work done.

Most of us didn't know anything about computers. We had no
education in that, and we (managers, generalists) regarded the
computer to simply be a number-crunching rig. Of course, as we
all know, the technology of information systems and computer
technology have advanced quite rapidly, and the machines became
cheaper. Then the new people graduating from the universities
came into the outfit with an education in computer programming
and computer technology so things were changing at the bottom.
We found, at least when I first was aware of it, when I was a
staff person on the Rogue River National Forest, some of the

141

Torheim: new foresters coming out to ranger districts wondered why there
was no computer.

Lage: How early was this? This was quite a while ago?

Torheim: 1961, 1962, in there. They had learned how to use computers.
Computers were then beginning to be a little smaller. So that
was my first insight that computers might even possibly be used
on the forests. I thought they were things you used up in Portland
or Washington or in the bank. Then first the technology developed
rapidly. The first thing we did in Region 6, the first change that
I can recall, was that we got into what we call "desk top"
computers. These purchases were closely controlled so again it
was done on an experimental basis. It was done for road design
mostly (that was well adapted) and other kinds of activity —
management planning, where you had lots of data, was done on
computers. But still a central computer system was doing most
of the work.

Then we got to the point where the computers were costing an
awful lot of money. By that time, I was in the regional office
and working on budgets and things and, gosh, it was clear into
the early seventies when I was deputy regional forester that Rex
Resler and I suddenly called a halt.

What we realized was when we looked at our budget, and we
were trying to make savings here and there, that decisions we
had made years ago (or somebody had) about the use of computers
had mortgaged our souls for the future. Because once you put

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Torheim: activities that used to be done by hand on the computer, you've
lost the hand technology and you're wholly dependent on that
computer to get the job done, or you designed your output needs
to be more complex than they were and they can't possibly go back
to hand cranking. So what we discovered was that decisions made
at lower levels of the organization in project work requiring
computers had mortgaged our opportunity to make any changes for
the future. So we just had to stop to understand what was
happening.

Well, this was happening simultaneously all over the outfit.
I've learned since that industry had the same problem. The
technicians had been managing the computers because it was
regarded to be a tool to get the job done, and really its costs
were not even being paid attention to [by] management, or decisions
weren't being made in terms of priority or how the dollars were
going to be used. Should we really get a new computer for this
national forest, or should these dollars go for some other activity?

Lage: Do you mean this is more in terms of the purchase of computers

rather than in the types of programs?

Torheim: Yes, and then the maintenance of them afterwards too.

Lage: But didn't they become essential in your land planning as it got

more complicated?

Torheim: Of course, but by that time we had gotten hold of the management
of it. The point is that the managers were not managing the use
and the funding of computer technology. It was just kind of a

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Torheim: given in the budget and then everything else was subordinate
to it because we were locked in.

About that time, the Department of Agriculture was trying to do
the same thing department-wide to get hold of it. So there were
lots of stops and goes, and that's been happening periodically
since, trying to get a management handle on it. The technology
was advancing so rapidly, too, that the small computer — $10,000
or less — became very feasible at the ranger district level.

Then we had to find ways to link these computers, to make
the most of our money. Then we had the internal arguments about
centralized computer systems versus distributive networks, with
the department pushing for a centralized system and decentralized
organizations like the Forest Service pushing for distributive
networks, using outside and internal computers in a mixed network.

The upshot of all this was that a lot of managers really got
turned off by computers — "stop the action right now; this thing is
a monster." They didn't understand it either. I know that we
felt that this thing had really gotten away from us because we
had abdicated our management role. We spent lots of time working
on the fleet of equipment (trucks and cars and all of that stuff),
and how we managed that in cost-effective ways in deciding whether
we were going to acquire new ones or not, but we just let this
computer thing run itself with the technicians telling us that we
got to have this computer for this! [laughter]

144

Torheim: This was felt service-wide, so the chief put together a study and
I think now each region and the Washington office too have
management involvement completely. There are all kinds of
management committees to get the technologist and the manager
together, and then management by objectives has helped so we can
look out to the future. Also, of course, the technology of
information systems has been simplified a lot so you don't have to
put huge million dollar investments anymore into incremental
change, into hardware.

So that's the small story of computers. As I say, it's been
repeated, I'm sure, in many organizations but the Forest Service
was awfully slow to pick up on it [laughs] until it became a
crisis.

Lage: What about the proliferation of computer programs throughout the

service? It sounds like there again was an instance where the
decentralized development may have had some benefits, but also
was inefficient.

Torheim: The benefit is, it stimulates creativity but it isn't always

cost effective when you find that regions are re-inventing the
wheel. But it does stimulate creativity. The trick is to find
the middle ground where you can stimulate creativity by giving
opportunity for experimentation, but then when you find something
that works, let's spread it around a bit so everybody doesn't
have to spend their own developmental time and dollars. That's
really what's taking place now. It's going to be a while before
it's all fixed, though, because a lot of people have ownership
in these programs.

145

Lage: Yes, and the other thing I think would be difficult is managers
without a lot of knowledge of computer technology having to make
the decisions or evaluate them.

Management Information Systems

Torheim: The job ahead, and this has taken place now visibly for the first
time, is the use of computers for management information. Still,
the dominant use of computers in the Forest Service until very
recently has been for a number crunching, as I call it.

Lage: What do you mean by that?

Torheim: Taking a mass of data and getting mathematical solutions, whether

they be for payroll or for engineering design, weather information,
cost accounting and that sort of thing. Now they're being used
more for management information systems linked to land-use
planning and the budgeting process.

Lage: How does that work?

Torheim: Well, it's terribly complex and I probably don't understand all
of it myself, but you can take the data that you generate
(inventory data) and you can ask the "what if" questions and
assemble data in various ways for different management objectives.
Computers nowadays even print out in real words instead of numbers.

Lage: So it prints out possible alternatives?

Torheim: It prints out possible alternatives, so you can select alternatives
or mix and match them and it does it very rapidly. And it does
more than that. Word processing — regions now are communicating by

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Torheim: computer. Mary was telling me here in Region 6, and Region 1 was
headed this way, that when they write a circular memorandum to
go to national forests, they just put it on their computer in
Portland. Then periodically during the day, forests will simply
interrogate the computer with their terminals and see what the
letters of the day were in the mail.

Lage: So it's a communication system as well.

Torheim: Yes, that's good. But there's a tendency, if you're not careful
to let the technicians use it as a toy that's darn expensive,
particularly when lower parts of the organization have the most
knowledge, and they're pushing the top to fund some of these
things which they sincerely believe will work well. This was the
dilemma that we were in in the Forest Service, but I think it's
being managed much better now. It took some organization change,
too, to do that, by the way, and get the managers more involved
instead of just putting it off in a subunit, technical subunits,
of the organization.

A Centralizing Influence

Lage: Does the use of the computer affect the organization? I think

you're saying some of this too, but does it make it more
centralized or does it allow it to be less centralized, or can
you pretty well control that effect?

Torheim: You can do it both ways.

Lage: Do you feel like you can control the computer?

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Torheim: Yes, you can control its use and what it's used for better. I
guess in many ways it has a tendency to centralize. In fact,
looking ahead a little bit, I see the Forest Service probably
moving back to more centralization in certain activities, simply
because of the complexity and cost. I don't mean the organization
generally to become that way. We talked earlier about all of the
experimentation that took place in the past in reorganization and
in work planning systems and land planning. That was not very
efficient. So the changes for the future and even in the recent
past have become a little more centralized and a little more
organized than simply saying let's see what the next push from
the field is. That's evident in land management planning emanating
from the National Forest Management Act. I think that's been done
very well.

Lage: Do you think that's a good thing? Or will that lead to less
experimentation and change?

Torheim: Well, I don't know but I think it will still permit experimentation
or change but more organized and directed. I think so, but we'll
have to wait and see. That's future oral history! [chuckles]

Innovative Response to New Technology

Lage: Are there any other communication systems that you might comment

on — for instance, use of satellites — or are there other new technical
advancements that have changed the way the Forest Service operates?

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Torheim: Of course, all of the communication systems and transportation
systems that society in general has. The Forest Service has
spanned transportation all the way from horseback to the jet
airplane. Satellites are used not directly by the Forest Service
to my knowledge anyway, but the resource inventory and mapping
is done now by satellite using NASA equipment. The Forest
Service has had an ongoing program with NASA in Houston to adapt
NASA technology to the Forest Service, for instance. That's
mostly in the mapping and inventory area.

Lage: So you use NASA experts or do you have Forest Service —

Torheim: We have Forest Service people on board as liaison, and they take
new technology and adapt it. They're mostly engineering people.
It's an ongoing program. It's been several years. There are a
lot of technical changes in fire [fighting] — the use of aircraft,
infrared imagery, of course fire retardants out of airplanes.

Lage: Would you describe the Forest Service as an innovative organization?
Does it pick up on these new technical advancements?

Torheim: Yes, very much, very much — within the confines of budget, of
course. We have development arms in the Forest Service, not
only in ongoing research, but we also have development centers
for equipment in California at San Dimas and at Missoula. We're
very active in developing equipment that private industry then
picks up on if there's a market for it and manufactures.

Lage: The Forest Service itself has developed the equipment?

149

Torheim: Yes, it's those kinds of things for which there isn't enough

market because it's so specialized that industry would not make
capital investments. So the Forest Service has these small
equipment development centers and is funded by the Congress.
It's small scale — trail diggers, for example, special tools for
fire fighting, safety equipment for fire. Nobody else does this
except the Forest Service. But that's not a large part of our
business.

Lage: You mentioned that you didn't have too much to contribute on the

subject of mathematical models.

Torheim: Not really, except as it's used in land management planning and
budgeting and the computer's end product. I was not, of course,
the developer of any of those things. But they were useful tools,
and so I fostered their development. That's the manager's job'
anyway. You have to see what the end product is and if it's
useful. Then you make it possible for the innovators to get their
job done. If roadblocks are in the way, you knock them down.
Then if after the periodic checks it fails, you go back and try
it over again, but [managers don't get involved] in the technology
itself.

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VI PERSONNEL MANAGEMENT

Civil Rights and Equal Opportunity

Lage: We're going to turn now to the question of personnel management
and particularly you have mentioned you wanted to talk about
civil rights and equal opportunity.

Torheim: The Forest Service has had great trouble trying to get a better
representation of the population in its work force mix. A lot
of it is historical. The Forest Service, because of the nature of
its work and the types of people who were attracted to it from
the very beginning, turned out to be mostly white Anglo-Saxon
Protestant males. The business was woods work and forestry. So
for many years it was really a single-profession, male outfit.
There were many women in the organization, but mostly in support
roles, in administration roles, clerical roles. I expect very
important roles, but they were not well represented throughout
the work force at all.

Also, in most of the Forest Service, there were very few
black people, Chicanos, or other minorities — very few Indians
surprisingly, even though the national forest are adjacent to all

151

Torheim: kinds of Indian reservations. No particular attempt was made to
attract people — women and minorities — to the work force because
the nature of the business was that people sought, jobs. There
was no social awareness or even concept of reaching out, which
there is today. That was true in society as a whole, and the
Forest Service was no different.

Now then, when the Civil Rights law was passed, and it became
a matter of public policy to begin to expand the work force to
represent the population better, the Forest Service, with its
gung ho attitude of getting things done, plunged right in. But
even today, the Forest Service has done poorly in this regard, and
you just can't believe how much effort has been put into doing
this. I've been troubled by this for a long time because we did
, put so much effort [in it] , and anything else that we did in the
Forest Service with this kind of effort usually produced results.
This has not happened in getting better representation in the
work force.

Efforts to Recruit Minorities

Lage: What type of effort are we talking about? What kinds of things
were done?

Torheim: We conducted nationwide, probably the first among government

agencies, a very highly sophisticated sensitivity program, first
of all, on the culture of minorities, what they're all about from
a manager's point of view; how to attract minorities into the work

152

Torheim: force. You see, many Forest Service people, as we were discussing
with my wife Marjean last night, lived out in the woods and really
had no contact with people other than people who looked just like
themselves and had the same value systems. Very few inner city
people wanted to work in the woods. They didn't like it. It
wasn't part of their culture, and they were not even much involved
in recreation activities in the forest.

So we thought it necessary, first of all, to have an internal
training program.

Lage: Was this when you were in Washington?

Torheim: Yes, and then later on when I was back out in the region again. We
started this in the sixties, and it accelerated in the seventies.
The Forest Service was characteristically low man on the totem
pole in the Department of Agriculture in achieving its minority
mix goals, and the Department of Agriculture was low in government.
So we were the lowest of the low.

It was easy to rationalize this, but we didn't do that
because we had a job to do. We approached it just like achieving
any other goal, and managers really worked their tails off to
accomplish this but with disappointing results. So it became
terribly frustrating.

Then we employed minorities in staff positions to help us
do this. We set up civil rights groups in regional offices and
in the Washington office. We began to reach out. We had
sophisticated recruiting programs to reach out and get people.

153

Torheim: We had great trouble finding qualified people who wanted to work
for us. There was great competition to get female and black,
particularly, professionals. We couldn't compete with the pay
that industry was giving. We'd get some aboard, and they'd do
well, and they'd go off to another agency who would offer them
better jobs.

Lage: Were the people you were able to recruit did they tend not to be

in forestry? Did they tend to be in business?

Torheim: Yes, right, you couldn't find forestry students who were black or
female for a long time. So then we began to work with the
universities and encouraged them to recruit minority students
themselves and we would provide work for them.

Torheim: As I was saying, this was frustrating and continues to be to
quite an extent in achieving minority goals. The effort the
Forest Service made continues. I think we were quite innovative
in putting together structured civil rights training programs and
using some of the techniques we used out of behavioral science
to see if we couldn't get our attitudes turned around and get our
people acquainted with what it takes to have minorities on the
payroll and what it takes to attract them to our kind of business.

We even, on a service-wide basis, used the southern region
to recruit black people because, after all, Montana had no chance
of getting black people. They just don't live there. So we were
attempting to get people out of the South and Chicanos out of the

154

Torheim: the Southwest. There was some success at that. But again, with

such cultural change, people didn't stay long. They found another
job later on back where they used to live, and they would take it.

Lage: I would think you would have more success with Indians or Chicanos

that might have more ties to the land.

Torheim: That very thing was done. We faced reality then and decided that
really Region 1 should concentrate on the Indian population
because, after all, there are lots of employable Indian young
people that live close to national forests. It's right within
their own culture, close to their homes, and they don't have to
go through cultural shock necessarily. So this is what Region 1
is doing now. It isn't realistic to encourage people unless they
want to and some do now. There are some who do and who do very
well. So this is the thrust in Region 1, and it's beginning to
work quite well, with lots of help from the forest supervisors.

Lage: Have there been any particular problems connected with such

things as different time concepts among some of the people
employed?

Torheim: Yes, that's true. You have to understand the culture of the society
from which these people are entering the work force. In Region 1
we contacted the community colleges, and we made a contract with
the tribes. The tribal councils are very interested in getting
their young people into the community colleges. Then we would
provide the work for them, even while they were in school, and
this seems to be working well. They're close to home. The

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Torheim: community colleges were even willing to put on training programs
right on their reservation. This is the way it's finally working
now.

Lage: Would they come in in technician roles?

Torheim: Yes, they'd be technicians. It wasn't realistic, right at the

outset, to encourage people to go to professional schools because
you really have to make it visible that there is a career, and
you have to get enough Indian people into your work force to make
that real, not just theoretical. It was easier to do something
in the short term and, besides, there was an employment problem
for these young men and women. So it met all those needs. I hope
this continues to work well.

In the other regions, Region 6, of course, has a mixed
population. I don't know how they're doing now but we were having
troubles retaining people once we got them because they would go
onto other work, which is okay. The goal should be to give
them opportunity and not necessarily to stay in your own outfit.
But still it's not going along like it should and I don't know
really why. I suppose it's going to take a while.

Employment of Women, a Success Story

Torheim: This is not true with women. The employment of women in the

Forest Service is an utter success story compared with where we
were. I don't say that the goal achievement is as high as it
should be, but compared with where we were and the progress that's

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Torheim: being made, I think it's working well. We have women graduates
now in forestry that come into the work force just the same as
men and in wildlife biology, landscape architecture, archeology,
you name it. The big gap is the lack of women in managerial
roles. As I was mentioning to you earlier, the first woman
ranger has been appointed in Region 2 (Colorado). I think this
is just one of many to come.

We have moved some professional women from other places from
private industry and universities directly into the work force,
but at rather high grade levels. The Forest Service has been
doing this for years.

Lage: In what types of work?

Torheim: The chief archeologists in Region 6 and in Region 1 are women.

They're at grade 13 or 14. The personnel officer, administrative
officers for forests, are more and more women. But we don't have
any women forest supervisors. That's what I'm talking about. We
have one director of information in San Francisco who has been
there for a couple of years, a woman. But I'm talking about women
in the mainstream of policy formulation and generalized management,
and those are line jobs. But I think that will come as more and
more women enter the work force. It's common now to have women
in all kinds of jobs at the ranger district and forest level.

Lage: Is this well-accepted from this predominantly male organization?

Torheim: I think this is an individual thing. My perception is that it's
so common now, it's accepted as an organizational norm. I think
some people still have personal hang-ups about it.

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Lage: Did you have the kind of training for that as you did for minority

employees?

Torheim: Yes, we did. Yes, we had a lot of problems. When we first began
to bring women into the work force, in traditional male roles,
we had a lot of opposition by some forest supervisors and rangers
and particularly the wives of Forest Service professionals. There
were really uprisings.

Lage: That's interesting. Men do work with women in other settings.

Torheim: The forest setting, though, is a little different. It's a pair
working together, small groups, much on their own; women living
in bunk houses for which we were not prepared. Now we build bunk
houses for men and women. There are all of these hang-ups that
people get into, not so much on what happened but what they
anticipate might happen — that kind of thinking. Wives who really
didn't want their husbands to go out in the morning in a pickup
with a female partner on a timber cruising job, something like
that. They would say, "I didn't want that to happen."

Then the response to that would be that forest supervisors
and rangers would not place women in roles like that. So
therefore, they couldn't get women to work in the forests because
those were the jobs. But this was overcome through experience.
So now I perceive that it's pretty well accepted as far as women
in the work force is concerned. Getting women into managerial
roles is the next step, but we're doing that. The way to
accomplish things is through goal establishment. Characteristically

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Torheim: in Region 1, we exceeded our goals annually in the hiring and
upward mobility of women. It was no trouble at all.

Lage: You found women eager to get into it?

Torheim: Yes, women were eager. They were competent. They were willing
to make the transition. They had an understanding that this was
a difficult thing for them to be accepted in the work force and
they performed as we expected them to — outstandingly. Put that
all together and it's not too hard finally to get acceptance.
But, gee, it took a long time. So I see that continuing, and now
if you look at the colleges of forestry and in other natural
resource curricula at universities, you'll see in some of them
as much as 50 percent women.

So I think we're on the way. Now, if we could only integrate
blacks, Chicanes, and Indians, particularly, into the work force
in a similar manner I think we would then achieve the social goals
we are supposed to achieve. But I think that will come. It's
just a little slow and the Forest Service has had great difficulty
in spite of massive energy.

Lage: Now, you, lean tell, "have been committed to this goal. Was the
commitment as widespread? Was there a difference between age
groups in the degree of commitment?

Torheim: Not once it became organization policy. We had trouble with
commitment originally because the people didn't think it was
possible. Since they didn't think it was possible then if they
had personal biases against it, they could put that right together

159

Torheim: with seeing to it that it became impossible. It takes more
than just, "Well, our door is open." It takes a commitment
to go out and bring people to your threshold and invite them
in and then nurture them while they're in. A lot of our folks
wouldn't take that step. They didn't think that was right.
People, if they were motivated, as they were, to get into an
organization should compete equally and find their own way.
We had difficulty overcoming that.

However, once it became a matter of the Forest Service's
reputation and the chief's reputation, and esprit de corps of
where we are a "can-do" outfit and we were a "no-do" outfit,
then even the people who were having trouble personally set that
aside and began to achieve this objective for organizational
purposes.

The Job Corps

Lage: Did the Job Corps provide you any help in this?

Torheim: The Job Corps was a great help in this, yes. At least it got our

people acquainted with women and minorities in a work environment.

Still the work environment wasn't quite the same.
Lage: What about developing interest, like so many people came in

through the CCC?
Torheim: The Job Corps didn't do that. We thought it was going to. We

thought, gee, you'll have so many black people and Chicanes as

Job Corps enrollees and, boy, when they graduate they'll come

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Torheim: right into the Forest Service. They were so far behind, even

when they graduated, they couldn't even qualify for the smallest
job. There were some, and a lot didn't want to I must say too.
A lot of them weren't trained for that. The education in Job
Corps was not in natural resources. It was to be a cook, to be
a carpenter, to be a painter, and we didn't employ those kind of
people.

Lage: So the Job Corps wasn't oriented to natural resources?

Torheim: No, it provided a natural resource environment to learn other
things.

Lage: Did it take them out for the most part into the forests?

Torheim: Oh, yes, that's where they lived, yes. It was a good environment,
an excellent environment.

Lage: That's interesting that they picked that environment, and yet they

weren't training them for that kind of a life. There is some
mystique about that environment.

Torheim: Because the original objectives of the Job Corps were not that

clear, it was thought that we would provide them woods work, and
that was the reason for putting them out there, and making them
employable through learning the world of work. It became
evident though that that wasn't a skill that was marketable, and
we had to provide them with the kinds of job skills that were
marketable. That became the trades — heavy equipment operators,
for instance. Then we began to, with contracts with the unions,
put together a really meaningful trade apprentice program. That's

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Torheim: what it is. It serves them better. They can go back into their
own environment and get a job. In fact, with the apprentice
program you were guaranteed a job. So it changed. Then the
character of the people who came into the Job Corps changed
too. So it was different.

Anyway, I'd say that women's role in the Forest Service is
moving along quite well, albeit slowly. At least it's easy to
see where it's headed. It's not so easy for me to see where
we're headed, at least in the western regions, with minorities
yet, but it will come.

Lateral Entry and the Promotion_of Specialists

Lage: You mentioned lateral entry into the profession and that might be

something we should follow up on. Hasn't there been sort of a
traditional objection to it?

Torheim: Yes, that's changed a lot in recent years, but yes, when it was
really foresters who were the largest professional body in the
Forest Service, you started from scratch and worked your way up;
everybody did. When we began to introduce other disciplines in
the Forest Service, though, we had to have instant expertise. So
we had to hire people at all levels. For example, we had to have
soil scientists who were truly professionals. We went to
universities and hired some to take on the director jobs and
upper staff jobs and the same with wildlife biologists and
fishery biologists. We got them from the state game and fish

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Torheim: departments. We picked up people from the Park Service, the
visitor information services naturalists, that sort of thing.
It wasn't until we began to have a need for these other
disciplines that we moved people laterally into the Forest
Service.

Lage: What about laterally at higher levels? Say, into personnel

management in Washington.

Torheim: Oh, we've done that, yes. Oh, yes, and that continues too;

not as much, but yes, there's some of that too, much more than
it used to be. That used to be rare. Now, just because of the
nature of the experience necessary, it isn't done maybe as much
as some agencies do, but still it's not a bit uncommon. It's
also not as uncommon if somebody leaves the Forest Service and
then comes ba«k. It used to be that that was it. If a person
would resign from the Forest Service and go to work for private
industry or the state or somewhere, they really weren't welcome
back. But that's not true anymore.

Lage: That was disloyalty?

Torheim: No, no, in fact, in many instances it's an excellent broadening

for them and they're oftentimes welcomed back if their performance
was good when they left and their performance was good where
they worked during that time.

Lage: At the higher levels, is it still the foresters who get the higher

jobs?

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x
Torheim: Our chief of the forest service now is an engineer. That's the

first time. Max Peterson is a civil engineer.

Lage: Was there any objection to that on traditional grounds?

Torheim: No, not that I know of. The Society of American Foresters didn't
rise up in arms or anything like that. We've had a regional
forester, as I remember, who was an engineer, at one time.
Engineers who have been in the outfit long enough have had the
same experiences as foresters.

Lage: They've come up the traditional way?

Torheim: Yes, as Max has. I would say though that, yes, most of them are
foresters and probably will continue to be because the profession
of forestry leads in that direction. But as these other
disciplines begin to work their way up from the specialist role
into the managerial role — I'm speaking of the wildlife biologists,
the fishery biologists, soil scientists, and landscape architects
and others — I think we'll see them assume the generalist roles
more and more. It's just natural.

Lage: More into the managerial end of it?

Torheim: Yes, and it's a personal choice. Lots of professionals in a
specialty really don't want to be in a generalist role. That
brings up a problem that I and others have tried to solve for
years and it hasn't been solved yet. Because of the civil service
classification system, you can achieve financial compensation in
increments of increase only by movement upward in the hierarchy,
not by becoming more proficient in your profession. There are
limits on that. I'll give some examples.

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Torheim: A wildlife biologist can work up in his or her specialty to

about grade 12 or 13, maybe 14 at the very most. But if they've
gone that route, then that's the end of it for them. If they
want to achieve higher level grades though, they had to make a
decision sometime back when they were a GS-11 or 12 that they
would move over to a more generalist position, which they could,
like a forest supervisor and ranger or whatever. Then they
could achieve higher grades up in the managerial roles.

That forces a specialist to make a decision at that earlier
time if they want to be the very best wildlife biologist in the
Forest Service or if they want to get compensated a little better
in the future and be a generalist. Now, private industry handles
this in a very effective way which I wish the government would
emulate, and that is, why shouldn't an expert wildlife biologist,
who wants to remain in that specialty be paid according to his or
her expertise rather than where that person sits in the hierarchy?
It's conceivable, for example, that a director of wildlife
management in a regional office might have some expert employees
getting more pay than the director. Research does this. Research
scientists are compensated not on the basis of where they sit
in the research hierarchy, but on their expertise.

Lage: What about that director himself, the director of wildlife

management? Isn't he an expert in that field?

Torheim: Not so much. When he moves there he's not so much anymore. He's
getting to be program manager. Anyway, the principle is that if
we could somehow compensate people for their expertise we would

165

Torheim: not force them off into generalist roles just to achieve better
compensation. We could provide distinct career ladders for
those people who want to choose between either being an expert
specialist or being a generalist. It shouldn't have to be
movement upward in the hierarchy to achieve pay compensation
commensurate with their expertise. You should be able to do it
with your specialty. This will happen someday. It happened in
research many years ago, but we just haven't made the grade. But
the Forest Service is still working at it.

Lage: How does the research division feed back into your specialists?

Torheim: There's a technology transfer mechanism. Research in the Forest
Service does research not just for the Forest Service in forestry
but for the nation as a whole — private industry and the states
and other federal agencies, as well, and internationally. So -the
Forest Service is one client. But the Forest Service is
responsible for the forestry research in the United States. Then
there are mechanisms to link the research knowledge to the
practitioner and it's done through the staff people — sometimes
well and sometimes less than well. That's a whole subject in
itself — technology transfer and some of the problems that are
attendant thereto. But that's the way it's done. I think that's
about the story on the intent of integrating more of society's
representatives in the work force of the Forest Service.

166

Employee Dissatisfaction in Region 6//#

Lage: I read a UCLA study report (which pointed out that Region 6 had the
highest level of employee dissatisfaction — ranger dissatisfaction —
with their job. You said you had some explanation for that.

Torheim: Region 6 got trapped a little bit, and it had to work its way out
of the trap. It came about this way. With the rapid increase in
timber management activities (timber sale programs) in Region 6
with the national need for housing, the region began to be funded
by the Congress with rather substantial increases to put more
timber on the market. Therefore, the region began to employ
foresters, as many as 80 to 120 a year and some years more.

So during a period of about 1957 or '59 somewhere up until
about 1965 or '67 (a period there of seven or eight years), large
numbers of foresters were coming into Region 6. They were being
recruited to do this job. Then the timber sale program was brought
up to the sustained yield levels and it flattened out. The region
then had a large number of forestry graduates. The way you work
your way up in the Forest Service is to work your way up in the
hierarchy. That's the way the classification system is. So
traditionally, you'd have to work your way up from an entrance
level of GS-5 or GS-7 and GS-9 working in a specialty and then

*William McWhinney, The National Forest: Lts Organization and
Its Professionals, 1970, p. 137.

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Torheim: you'd have to go to GS-11 as a district ranger or maybe a
forest staff.

But there were so many people at this entrance level (GS-5,
7, and 9) that there weren't enough jobs for them to move up in
any reasonable span of time to GS-11. In fact, many of them
weren't even able to get out of GS-7. So there was a tremendous
blockage.

This caused an awful problem. These folks couldn't really
find employment in other regions either because the high level
of activity was mostly in Region 5 and Region 6. Region 5 had
a similar problem. It just wasn't in the same dimension.

I was in personnel management at the time that we began to
really consider this as being an issue. This was 1966. So
Region 6 tackled the problem and decided that we needed to do
something about it. So we worked out an elaborate system with
other regions and with the Washington office to find other
assignments for these people. We had to do that.

The other thing that we had to do was begin to put technicians
in the work force. What we discovered we had done was to hire
foresters and really were putting them in technician-type jobs
because they could land on their feet so to speak, particularly
if you graduated from a western school! So we had foresters that
were really not promotable because they were in technician jobs.
Lage: But their expectations were higher.

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Torheim: Yes, right, of course they were. Then we had some foresters that

we hired who truly weren't foresters. They were indeed technicians,
even though they had a forestry degree. So we had to sort out
those folks and redirect their careers. We were taking any forester
who graduated there for such a long time. Anyway, with all of this
we began to then tackle the problem. We worked with the community
colleges in Oregon and Washington and helped them strengthen
their technician programs, their two-year associate degree
programs. We worked closely with them. We found opportunities
for foresters to move on to other regions in some cases. Some
were moved into technician jobs and sought careers — found careers —
moving up the technician ladder.

Lage: How far can you move up the technician ladder?

Torheim: Well, not very far compared to professionals but then some people
want to be specialists and be very good at a narrower job. So
we found some of those who really were more comfortable doing that —
not a great number, but some were. Then we almost stopped the
recruiting of new foresters until we got this sorted out. But
there was a period there of about five years when there was
tremendous dissatisfaction by this great pool of GS-7s, essentially
foresters.

Then as we began to sort this out and get people distributed
better in the work force (and of course retirements and people
moving on helped too) , we designed a different kind of recruiting
system on a much lower level and a planned experience program for

169

Torheim: new foresters so when they came into the work force, they knew
that if their performance justified [it] , that they could work
their way up to a journeyman grade in five years, and if they
couldn't they ought to go out. So that's kind of the way it
works now. It's changed a lot because the work load is different
now. It's more diversified and the levels of recruitment are
much lower. There are personnel ceilings now. So that was a
temporary thing that we tackled, but it wa a great concern to
the service as a whole even though most of the problem was in
Region 6.

Role of Technicians^ in the Work Force

Lage: You mentioned the technicians. Has the role of the technician

changed over the years?

Torheim: Yes, the junior colleges (the community colleges) have done a
marvelous job of educating technicians to a very high level of
competence. So the Forest Service really has many technicians,
not just in forestry but in engineering and in the business-
management activities as well.

Lage: These work under rangers primarily?

Torheim: Right, mostly.

Lage: How is the relationship between the professional arm and the

technician?

Torheim: The technician is the doing arm; they're the experts. In timber,
for example, they would cruise the timber and lay out the timber
sales and do the technical work of that kind. The forester would

170

Torheim: prescribe the kind of silvicultural techniques to use — the latest
professional technology to regenerate timber and that sort of
thing. The technician would raise the trees in the nursery. In
fire management the technician is really highly skilled in fire
fighting, fire management, forest fuels work and that sort of
thing.

The professional is in the policy area, new technology, the
translation of research results into new ways of doing business.
They are two jobs. Early in a person's career, a professional
might well be working for a skilled technician of a much higher
grade. They work together, and technicians train new foresters
so to speak, and other professionals as well.

Lage: Does that create some ill feeling?

Torheim: Well, no. I suppose there might be some individuals. That was
true when I started in the Forest Service too, by the way. We
didn't call them technicians. The oldtimers that really ran the
district trained all of the new professionals in how to do things.
We would impart our knowledge of more theoretical things and that
sort of thing to technicians. It's always been a very close
relationship.

One of the changes that's taken place, however, between
technicians of today and the past is that technicians today are
much more mobile than they used to be. The technician of the past
for many years was usually a local person who grew up in the
same locale as the ranger station that he worked at, oftentimes

171

Torheim: lived just down the road or had a small ranch; very often worked
only seasonally, but never had any idea of moving because their
roots were firmly there where they worked. That kind of
identified the technician. Now, that was great. That kind of
tenure when the professionals were moving around a lot really
kept the warp and the woof of the outfit together.

That's not true anymore. There's some of that, but we find
now that technicians move readily from one region to another, from
one forest to another, just the same as anybody else. But for
those who don't wish to, there is still a fine career with tenure
being very much a plus, if they keep up with the technology of
the business.

Regional Differences and Washington Office Coordination////

Lage: I wanted to go back again to some other questions on some of the

things we've already covered. I was telling you about the GAO
study of '78 that seemed to indicate that the integrating of all
the aspects of the RPA had fallen short, at least by '78. They
mentioned that in Washington the headquarters groups for RPA
budget and programming, and land management planning were
uncoordinated, were separate.

Torheim: We felt this in the field as well. Of course, it's quite complex
and the organization to carry it out wasn't fully developed.
The goal was to integrate the RPA and the land management planning

172

Torheim: under the National Forest Management Act, to distribute the

national RPA goals then to each national forest, and assist them
through the regional plan, and then have those mesh with the
ability of the lands in that forest to produce those goals. That's
a tall order.

At the same time, the techniques for doing that were still
being developed. But it was not done in a coordinated fashion
at the Washington office level. So as typically happens in the
Forest Service, the regions then have a tendency to go off on
their own and make it work. This is happening less and less as
this becomes an established way of doing business. It's now
become okay for regions to do that and the chief will actually
select a region or two to do the experimentation for the Forest
Service. We're doing that in Region 1. I suppose that in the
past Region 1 might have, just on its own, as we did in land
management planning, say, "We're going to go out and make a
product and see if the rest of the service will accept it."

Now it's a little better managed and regions are actually
selected to do that. So we were doing that in Region 1. The
inherent competition though, again, between regions makes other
regions want to also reach out and see if they can't do it too.
So they were doing this. So a forest was selected for each region
this time to experiment. Our region developed the computer program
to do this very job of integrating. So when the GAO made its
remarks, they were appropriate. The will to integrate it was there,

173

Torheim: but it hadn't been achieved yet. So it was partially achieved.

On those forests where land management plans had been essentially
completed, they were being used (although crudely) to formulate
budgets and then to see if we couldn' t get the RPA goals at
least in part distributed downward through that plan.

But with the new forest plans, now, it looks like RPA and
land management planning will get together in the system that was
envisioned originally. This will take a little while.

Fostering and Controlling Innovation in the Field

Lage: It sounds from what you've said that Region 1 is particularly

innovative. Is that true?

Torheim: In certain areas. Each region is innovative in different things

I suppose. Region 3 was the most innovative region to my knowledge
when we were doing work planning. They had a very sophisticated
system which was adopted by the regions later on, and they probably
did better. Region 4 was a leader in the Forest Service in
multiple-use planning. Each region will kind of pick up on
something that they're particularly interested in and had probably
some experts or people interested also — a regional forester and
other managers — who thought that that was a good thing to do.

So this was one of the strengths of the Forest Service in
my judgment; it just needed to be managed a little bit. Occasionally
we would go out and get so innovative individually and so
possessive of our own innovative ability that we would find each

174

Torheim: region inventing its own wheel. That's counter-productive and
expensive. The service has kind of gathered all that up, and
the field feels good about that. The field used to complain
about this, that "we don't really all have to do our own thing."
On the other hand, it's a fine line about how far do you let
innovation go and make it manageable without stifling creativity
which I think can be managed.

Lage: You mentioned that the Forest Service has a reputation in

Washington for being very innovative and that other agencies come
to them as an example.

Torheim: Yes, I experienced that a lot in personnel practices and training,
employee development, organization development, especially, but
not limited to that; Forest Service work planning techniques
[have been] adopted by other agencies. The Forest Service has
been a leader in using modern management techniques to get
government business done.

Lage: Then why did they have this openness? It's been described as kind

of a closed organization coming from, in the past, basically, one
profession — and yet they've been open to using techniques outside
their field.

Torheim: I think it's — well, I can only speculate — one thing is the very
nature of managing the public lands and natural resources, it's
something that's being developed as you go. There is no body of
precise knowledge, like mathematics or engineering, that permits
you to manage and integrate any trade-offs between natural

175

Torheim: resources. So the person in the field has to use basic education
and ecology and the biological sciences and apply all of them and
like a big grand organ — with some kind of plan, of course, and
whatever research knowledge is available — to make it work. So
there is a way of looking at the job to be done that isn't
precisely defined. Couple that with a decentralized organization
that puts personal responsibility at the lowest level of the
organization for significant achievement. I think you have the
ingredients then that stimulate creativity and willingness to
innovate or try new things.

Coupled with that, the policy of transferring people from
one unit to another and to Washington from the field and back has
a tendency to disseminate this kind of thinking from the bottom
• of the organization to the top. Then the esprit de corps and good

feedback that accompanies that, perpetuates it, I think. The living
close to your job, the close amalgamation between family life and
the job itself in the early part of most people's career
contributes to that feeling also, and the willingness to work
more than eight hours a day, the willingness for wives to pitch
in and kind of live the same job life their husband does, at least
for that part of your career when you're in a ranger district.

Lage: Is this still current today?

Torheim: Yes, to a lesser extent than it once was, but there is much of
this still there. Let me put that altogether. That's the
ingredients that make up the culture of an organization over time,

176

Torheim: I would guess, so a lot of it becomes kind of subliminal really.
You just pick it up as you would any culture in any organization
or society. So I think probably that's speculation, but in my
judgment [it's] what makes the outfit tick.

Lage: From what you've said the field has been the leader in so many

of the changes and the innovations, and the Washington office
sort of comes along afterwards.

Torheim: Yes, that's right in some things. I don't think that's unusual
either because the felt need is at the field level. Now, the
Washington level has a different mission too. As every Washington
office does in government, they had a difficult job of making
the span from the legislative process (the political process) to
the administrative process. In other words, translating the laws
and regulations into how the job is to be done. So they lived in
a world that was quite different from the field world which is
getting jobs done on the land and dealing with the users directly.
So it's hard for Washington office people to even find time to
get into their heads the field needs on a day-to-day basis. Now,
this is, of course, worked at very strenuously through visits to
the field, the management review system, and the simple process of
moving people back and forth keeps a sense of reality at that
level. So that's not unusual. In fact, I think it's healthy for
innovation to really come from the field level.

177

Torheim: The key though is not letting it go wild, but accepting that and
managing it. I see the Forest Service doing that more now by
actually designating regions, even at their own suggestion, to
experiment, and then "let's monitor it and we'll help you with it
and other regions can look in your window while you're doing it."
That's becoming the accepted way of doing business now and I'm
glad to see that.

Lage: Is there anything else you think we need to add to this picture of

management technology?

Torheim: I think we've covered about all I know and probably a lot of stuff
I don't know! [laughter]

Lage: That's good! That's what oral history is all about. Okay, let's

sign off then.

Transcriber: Michelle Stafford
Final Typist: Keiko Sugimoto

178

TAPE GUIDE — Robert Torheim

Interview 1: March 13, 1980 1

tape 1, side A 1

tape 1, side B 18

tape 2, side A 36

tape 2, side B 55

tape 3, side A 72

Interview 2: March 14, 1980 77

tape 3, side A (continued) 77

tape 3, side B 89

insert from tape 5, side A 106

tape 4, side A 109

tape 4, side B 120

tape 5, side A 137

tape 5, side B 153

insert from tape 4, side A 166

resume tape 5, side B 171

179

INDEX — Robert Torheim

budget. See organizational management, budget allocation process
Bulfer, Dan, 96

Civilian Conservation Corps, 4, 5, 7, 9, 79

Civil Service Commission, conflict with Forest Service, 20

Cliff , Edward P. , 106-107

communication systems, 147-148

computers:

centralizing influence, 146-147

and management information, 145-146

management problems with, 140-145

conflict management and resolution, 53-54, 56-57, 101-106
Congress, U. S. :

and Forest Service budget, 19, 31, 68-69, 92

Forest Service dealings with, 131-139

and legislation re national forests, 42-44

Depression, 1930s, influence of, 3

diaries, 89-90

Douglas, William 0., 38-41

engineers in Forest Service, 19-21, 23

fire control, influence on Forest Service management, 77, 80

Forest and Rangeland Renewable Resources Planning Act. See Resources

Planning Act

forestry schools and education, 18-20
Forest Service, United States

custodial role, pre-World War II, 15-16

field experimentation and influence, 30, 32-33, 42, 60-64, 111-113, 121,
172-174, 176-177

increasing size and complexity of, 26-28

regional differences, 24-26, 33, 64, 137-138, 173

specialization in, 19-23, 26-28, 54-57, 161-165

timber management, predominance of, 16-19

Washington office, 60, 64, 171-174

See also organizational management, personnel management, land and
resource planning techniques

grazing on national forests. See range management

180

inspection system, 80, 120-124. See also management reviews
Job Corps, 11, 97-19, 159-161

land and resource planning techniques :

functional planning, 28

land management planning, 33-34, 45-51, 62-68

multiple-use planning, 29-33

See also individual resources, i.e., timber management
legislation:

effect on Forest Service, 30-33, 46, 110

Forest Service influence on, 134-139
Lolo National Forest plan, 45-51
Lyman, Hy , 94, 95

McGuire, John, 107-108

management by objectives. See organizational management

management reviews , 122-124

managerial grid training system, 95-100

manual and directive system, 7, 8, 86

mathematical models, use of, 149

Multiple Use Act, 30-31, 42

multiple-use ethic, 24-26

National Forest Management Act, 42, 44, 45, 64, 65

organizational management

budget and allocation process, 21-22, 39-40, 62, 68-76, 87-89

line/staff positions, 13, 21-23, 69-73, 113-119

management by objectives, 91-93

reorganization, 1970s, 13, 73-76, 109-120

scientific management techniques, 78-80, 87-91, 106, 120

personnel management

authoritarian management, 77-86, 106-107

employee training, 95-100, 137, 139, 153

minority hiring, 150-155

participative management, 62, 92-108

promotion and demotion, 11-12, 14, 58-59, 81-85, 104, 116, 161-169

women, employment of, 155-159
pesticide use on national forests, 130

political responsibilities of field administrators, 131-139
project work inventory, 69-71, 78, 88

181

public involvement in land allocation and management, 105, 127-128
Forest Service reaction to, 125-127, 129-130
systematic input and evaluation, 46-51, 53-54
user influence, 34-41

Rahm, Neil, 96

range management, 16, 35

ranger grades and responsibilities, 58-59, 67-73, 81-85, 166-169

recreational uses of national forests, 4-5, 16

Resler, Rexford, 132, 141

Resources Planning Act (RPA) , 42-43, 91-92

scientific management. See organizational management
Seattle, Washington, 1-3
Stone, Herbert, 97

technicians, 168, 169-171

technology, innovative use of, 143-147. See also computers

timber management, 16-19, 25-33

Torheim, Robert H.

career summary, 8-14

Civilian Conservation Corps enrollee, 5, 7

education, 5-6

wife and children, 7-8

youth and family, 1-5

uniform work planning, 61-62, 86

work load measurement, 78, 86, 87
World War II, 5-6

influence on Forest Service, 16-17

Yakima Valley elk management, 37-38

Ann Lage

1963: B.A., history, honors graduate, University of

California, Berkeley

1965: M.A., history, University of California, Berkeley
1966: Post-graduate studies, American history; Junior

College Teaching Credential, history, University

of California, Berkeley

1970-1974: Interviewer/member, Sierra Club History Committee
1974-Present : Coordinator/Editor, Sierra Club Oral History

Project

Coordinator, Sierra Club Archives Development Project

Liaison, Sierra Club Archives, Bancroft Library,
University of California, Berkeley

Research Consultant, conservation history, Sierra Club
1978-Present :' Co-Chairman, Sierra Club History Committee
1976-Present : Interviewer/Editor, conservation affairs,

Regional Oral History Office, University of California,
Berkeley

r %

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Full text of "Management technology in the U.S. Forest Service: experimentation and innovation in the field, 1948-1979 : oral history transcript / and related material, 1980"

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